On October 4, 1957, at 10:28:04 pm, Moscow time, Sergei Korolev and the OKB-1 (the Russian Special Design Bureau 1) took humanity into the Space Age with the launch of Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth.
Forty-seven years later, Scaled Composites/Mojave Aerospace flew the Tier One SpaceShipOne Flight 17P - X-Prize Flight 2 mission on 4 October 2004, in which Burt Rutan's privately funded SpaceShipOne made its second flight within 2 weeks to an altitude in excess of 100 km to capture the Ansari X Prize for the first civilian spacecraft to do so.
Together these events make October fourth an important one in the history of human space travel: Sputnik 1 opened the door to all of the space travel, exploration and development (Space T/E/D) that has followed. It is expected that SpaceShipOne's flight will be a similar gateway event, leading to widespread development of private business operations in space.
To quote Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, inventor, pioneering rocket scientist - "The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one can not live in a cradle forever!"
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