SpaceShipOne Begins Part 2 of Prize Flight

Monday, October 04, 2004

MOJAVE, Calif. — A stubby rocket plane was slung from the belly of a carrier plane toward space Monday in the final leg of a trip toward the edge of the Earth's atmosphere and a $10 million prize.

A new pilot and potential astronaut, Brian Binnie (search), was chosen to fly the second flight into space in six days for SpaceShipOne (search), the rocket plane funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen (search).

The carrier plane took off from a desert runway and the plane was released in midair and fired its rocket to continue on its own to an altitude of just over 62 miles — generally considered to be the point where the Earth's atmosphere ends and space begins.

If it succeeds, the backers will claim the Ansari X Prize (search), intended to spur private enterprise to develop rockets that could carry tourists into space. The $10 million award goes to the first privately built, manned rocket ship to fly in space twice in a span of two weeks.

A crowd of thousands of space enthusiasts and a throng of news media gathered at Mojave Airport in the early morning darkness to watch the flight. Last week, SpaceShipOne rolled dozens of times as it hurtled toward space at three times the speed of sound.

The choice of Binnie as Monday's pilot was kept secret until hours before the scheduled takeoff. One of four pilots who have undergone special training to fly SpaceShipOne, Binnie was at the controls when it broke the sound barrier for the first time on a December test flight.

Both the first flight by a private plane into space on June 21 and the latest flight on Wednesday were flown by Michael Melvill, who has been awarded the nation's first commercial astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration.

After a safety analysis, SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan posted preliminary information about last week's flight on his Web site this weekend to address what he called the "incorrect rumors" that have circulated.

The first roll occurred at a high speed, about Mach 2.7, but aerodynamic loads on the spacecraft were low and decreasing rapidly "so the ship never saw any significant structural stresses," he said.

Ansari X Prize founder Peter Diamandis hoped the multimillion-dollar incentive would have the same effect on space travel as the Orteig Prize had on air travel. Charles Lindbergh claimed that $25,000 prize in 1927 after making his solo trans-Atlantic flight.

Major funding came from the Ansari family of Dallas. More than two dozen teams around the world are trying to win the prize, but only SpaceShipOne has reached space.

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe came to Mojave to watch last week's flight, and Marion C. Blakey, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, came to watch Monday's flight.

"I think it's an enormous step because what it does, really, is establish I think in the minds of the average American the fact that that this is something that you can actually consider in your lifetime," Blakey said Sunday.

Last week, Richard Branson, the British airline mogul and adventurer, announced that beginning in 2007, he will begin offering paying customers flights into space aboard rockets like the SpaceShipOne. He plans to call the service Virgin Galactic.

That must have been a hell of a ride!

Burt Rutan is one hell of an engineer.

and so Nasa is threatened by Commerical Space flight. It was only time.