manned rocket

Sept. 25, 2008: China’s third manned rocket, Shenzhou VII, was launched into space where an astronaut clambered out of the spacecraft and walked in space.

Ever since last Saturday’s launch of the first manned rocket from U.S. soil in nine years, my mind has been thumping with Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 anthem to the Apollo space program and its crushing irrelevance for black lives.

Virgin Galactic was founded by British billionaire Richard Branson after the historic 2004 flights of the experimental SpaceShipOne, which was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and won the $10 million Ansari X Prize as the first privately developed, manned rocket to reach space.

He built his first manned rocket in 2014 — a contraption he called the “X-2 SkyLimo” — and managed to launch himself more than 1,300 feet over Winkelman, Ariz., he told the Associated Press.

Allen founded Stratolaunch Systems Corp. in 2011 after emerging in aerospace by funding the development of the experimental air-launched SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 became the first privately built manned rocket to reach space.