One Day After Getting FAA Launch Permit

Hot on the heels of receiving it's FAA license, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne team had a perfect rocket-powered flight Thursday, reaching an altitude of 105,000 ft.

Behind the controls of SpaceShipOne's second successful powered flight was pilot and future astronaut, Peter Siebold. The engine burned for 40 seconds and reached a speed of approximately Mach 2, making it the first privately built space vehicle to accomplish this feat.

"105,000 feet down, 223,000 feet to go!" exclaimed an excited onlooker, as he watched the ship fly overhead, a reference to the X-Prize goal of reaching 328,000 feet -- a bit more than 62 miles in altitude. The first of 27 competing teams to accomplish that wins the $10 million first prize.

This is the second "Mach" flight of SpaceShipOne. The first powered flight of this vehicle was only a few months ago, occurring on December 17, 2003. During that exercise, SSO fired its single rocket propulsion system for all of 15 seconds. The aggressive and fast-paced program has met with few obstacles outside of some occasional controllability/stability concerns and one landing accident, during the (so far) 13 flight program. 

FMI: www.scaled.com, www.xprize.com