Pic: First 50 Years of Spaceflight

[Dr Mordrid]

http://www.space.com/11348-spaceships-human-spaceflight-50th-anniversary-infographic.html

[cjolley]

Very cool. Thanks

[UtwigMU]

As Gagarin said: Поехали! (Let's go!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb3iC9HctBs

[paulw]

I think the next 50 years will be way slower..

[VJ]

I think so too....

It still puzzles me why there are no more launches in the way the X15 is launched... It seems fairly efficient: a plane takes it to a high altitude, then it seperates and from there on it is on its own... Only Spaceship one is launched similarly, and there are over 40 years between them (X15 was retired in the '70s).
Especially for smaller (unmanned) things it seems like a very economic solution...

[Dr Mordrid]

Mothership launches are still around. SpaceShipTwo launches from under a mothership, as does Orbital Sciences Pegasus small sat launcher. Both XCOR's Lynx and SpaceShipTwo will eventually launch small sats from pods, and a larger small sat launcher, LauncherOne, is planned to fly from under White Knight 2 - SS2's mothership. This pic shows the Lynx configuration -

XCOR Lynx & pod


Orbital Sciences Pegasus


Virgin Galactic LauncherOne concept -

[VJ]

The are around, but it took a very long time for them to come back... I mentioned SpaceShip One as it was the first... But ok, I omitted Orbital Sciences because I forgot about them, and I'm not sure they turned that many heads. After the X15 is took almost 40 years for the concept to be reconsidered... Weird, because it looks like an obvious good concept.