Director Kevin Curran on Burt Rutan and the weight of strapping a friend to a rocket and pushing the launch button to win the Ansari X Prize. Watch this full episode of "Reality Check": https://youtu.be/TdNs8TqLjrI #AnsariX #BurtRutan #KevinCurran
In this episode of "Reality Check," Ross Coulthart sits down with Kevin Curran, the cinematographer and director behind "Beyond Blue Sky: The Untold Story of the First Private Astronauts." It's a documentary about the small Mojave Desert team that built SpaceShipOne and won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004. Curran takes us inside the trials and tribulations of that race, the engineering long shots, the near-fatal test flights and the redemption arc of pilot Brian Binnie after a hard-landing crash that nearly ended the program. The conversation then turns to the encounter that may have changed history, Binnie's account of seeing roughly a dozen unidentified objects in his backyard six days after SpaceShipOne's first powered flight…