SpaceShipOne Wins X-Prize

Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, piloted by former Navy test pilot Brian Binnie, reached an altitude of 368,000 feet Monday, meeting the criteria for the $10 million Ansari X-Prize.

The flight appeared smooth, without the stomach-churning rolls that plagued the first qualifying flight.

In the process of apparently winning the X-Prize, Rutan's small, privately-built spacecraft also broke the altitude record set back in the 1960s by the X-15.

A crowd of thousands -- much larger than during the past two suborbital shots -- watched as Binnie made the long, monotonous climb to launch altitude inside SpaceShipOne, slung below its mothership, White Knight. SpaceShipOne's pilot for the past two suborbital flights, Mike Melvill, piloted White Knight for this attempt.

"This is the true frontier of transportation," said FAA Administrator Marion Blakey, who watched the flight from near the runway at the Mojave Spaceport. "It feels a little bit like Kitty Hawk must have."

After the flight, SpaceShipOne was towed in behind a pickup truck; the crowd went wild. The pilot that flew the flight, the engineer that designed it, the key personnel that made it happen stepped up on the podium -- a speech was definitely in order.

Burt Rutan took a moment after the flight to plug a Discovery Channel documentary on the flight: "Last night was a phenomenal experience for us, because we had not seen the documentary done by Discovery. What they did there was to show very, very deep inside our program... it gives you a phenomenal feel for how difficult it was, and... if you haven't seen it it's an amazing piece on development of a private spaceship." The next installment of the documentary, covering the two X-Prize flights, airs on October 7.

Rutan stressed the safety of his system. "We are building a system to take passengers into space, it has to be 100 TIMES safer than anything that has flown in space before." He delivered a couple of his trademark digs at NASA, and pointed out that the unique, innovative "feathered" re-entry is the safest re-entry yet devised, and that the engine of SpaceShipOne is a safe engine that, unlike many rocket engines, is non-explosive.  Dr. Peter Diamandis later pointed out that 18,000 NASA employees, space enthusiasts who never had a chance before to fly in space, now do.

Pilot Brian Binnie, 51, praised the team behind the machine, and brought his wife on stage to take her fair share of the credit. Binnie reported that they had passed, "for sure," 360,000 feet, and according to his in-cockpit instrumentation should have achieved 375,000 feet. He also called SpaceShip pilots Mike Melvill and Peter Siebold to the stage to share in his glory. Flight Director Doug Shane stood behind him.

"Let me say I thank God that I live in a country where this is possible," Binnie said. "And I really mean that. There's no place on Earth that you can take this flag and take it up to space."

The rocket ship, built and operated by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites of Mojave and powered by an innovative, ultra-safe engine made by SpaceDev of Poway, CA, appeared to rise absolutely straight into the sky, without any anomalies. Binnie, whose test flight experience spans craft from Naval weapons tests to the unusual Roton atmospheric test vehicle, was understandably extremely pleased. It was one flight, it was one prize, but it was also a marker for the threshold of a new era in space travel.

Diamandis asked the crowd, "who thinks you can fly in space now?" and was rewarded with a lusty cheer. When he asked who thought they would in the next five years, the shouts were not quite as many or quite as loud. The ebullient Diamandis just grinned: he now has a track record of doing the impossible.

FMI: www.scaled.com