On Thursday, December 13, 2018 at 3:17:29 PM UTC-5, Tim wrote:
You know civilian space travel is coming...

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/12/13/...-of-space.html

It's not the same thing, but back in the 90's I was into high power rocketry. During that time frame there were 3 guys that got together and built an amateur rocket that flew to the edge of space. It was a boosted dart, which means the bottom part was a big, fat rocket motor and the top was a skinny but heavy small rocket with no motor. When the lower stage burns out the upper stage drag separates and keeps going (from inertia) until gravity does its thing.

They launched it in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. It had a downward looking camera with a RF downlink for video and telemetry. It hit mach 3.something, and the dart traveled to a bit over 50 miles. I can't find it now, but there used to be a video showing the flight. You saw the earth fall away, and when it hit apogee (arced over), you saw the curvature of the earth and then tons of stars. Unfortunately, it came in ballistic and impacted a few miles downrange. Even with a backhoe, they only recovered a few bits.

The story was it took them over a year to build it, and it cost one of the guys his marriage.