Techcentralstation has my piece up today on Spaceship One. Thought I ought to expand a little on the first sentence:

As the third generation of my family to work, however peripherally, in rocketry and aerospace perhaps I can add my $0.02’s worth to the Spaceship One celebrations?

I’m not sure how many people out there can claim to be third generation involved with rocketry and space. The number is surely greater than just me and I would guess less than 10,000, maybe less than 1,000.
Grandfather worked on Seafire and Spitfire before the war (he went through Cranwell, the RAF Officers College with Frank Whittle, the inventor of the British jet engine) and after the war worked on the Atlas programme in California and the Blue Streak program, a UK derivation.
Father was Royal Navy and spent a huge portion of his working life on the Polaris, Chevaline and Trident programmes.
Me? My relationship is a little less involved. I’ve supplied bits and pieces to the Russian space programme over the years. The main thing that keeps me fed is the manufacture and sale of Soviet developed alloys for the space program (obligatory scandium reference, these are aluminium scandium based alloys) into the western markets. Over the 10 years we’ve been doing this we’ve seen these alloys go from “WTF”? to cute things to make expensive basball bats and bikes from to both Boeing and Airbus using them in their next generation planes.
We’re also supplying some other really cool materials to a NASA/DoD programme, but I can’t tell you which programme or what materials. I’d have to track you down via the logs and, well, perhaps not kill you but give you a really stern talking to at least. Make you sign a piece of paper or something. I am a European after all.