Scaled Has Released the Mission Summary For Mike Melvill's Trip Into Space

They thrilled the world... and set a standard for perseverance and courage that few can ever hope to match -- but the aviation and aerospace world is still amazed at last week's flight into space... a flight that cost less than most NASA Paper studies. Here's Scaled's Mission Summary for Mike's Big Adventure.

Flight 60L / 15P
         
Date: 21 June 04
Flight Time: 1.6 hour / 24 min 05sec   
White Knight Pilot: Binnie White Knight Copilot: Stinemetze
SpaceShipOne Pilot:  Melvill     
High Chase Alpha Jet Crew: Van der Schueren/Johnson
High Chase-Starship Crew: Karkow/Scherer     
Low Chase-Extra Crew: Coleman/Bird

Objectives: First commercial astronaut flight by exceeding 100 kilometers (328,000 ft) 

Results: Cheered down the runway by onlookers, the White Knight turbojet launch aircraft took off at 647 a.m. PST, carrying SpaceShipOne under its fuselage to an altitude of 47,000 feet. At 750 a.m. PST, flight engineer Matt Stinemetz released the spaceship and test pilot Mike Melville immediately fired the hybrid rocket motor. The rocket burn lasted for 76 seconds rocketing the vehicle to more than 2.9 Mach or 2150 miles an hour. At motor burn out, SpaceShipOne was at 180,000 feet and from there coasted the rest of the way into space reaching an apogee of 328,491 feet. Melvill experienced weightlessness for approximately 3 � minutes as the vehicle slowly decelerated to apogee and then yielding to the pull of gravity commenced its historic return to earth in the craft's unique entry or feathered configuration. During the descent the pilot experienced forces greater than 5.0 G's as the vehicle accelerated again to 2.9 Mach. Melvill reconfigured the vehicle back to a glider at 57,000 feet and over the next 20 minutes enjoyed a leisurely descent to a graceful landing at Mojave, the Nation's first inland Space Port.

SpaceShipOne Flight 15P Anomaly: As mentioned in the post-flight press conference, during SpaceShipOne's historic flight to 100 kilometers on 21 June 2004 there was a flight control malfunction. Late in the boost phase, the vehicle s primary pitch trim control was lost. Scaled views any flight control system anomaly as a serious matter, but to guard against these problems, the vehicle has redundancy on all flight-critical systems, including pitch trim. So when the failure occurred, test pilot Mike Melvill switched to the backup system and continued the planned mission. However, the resulting trajectory excursion had two effects. One, the vehicle didn't climb as high as planned and two, the space ship re-entered south of the intended recovery point. This latter effect, while undesirable, was well within the vehicle's glide capability and SpaceShipOne had no difficulty flying back to Mojave Space Port for a normal landing.

FMI: www.scaled.com