One Giant Leap Forward

By Ernest Lilley

June 25, 2004

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Paul Allen, Mike Melvill, and Burt Rutan wear smiles after the SpaceShipOne's successful flight into space.

At 7:51 AM PST, June 21, 2004, 50,000 feet over the Mojave desert, SpaceShipOne, Burt Rutan's experimental spaceplane, took a giant leap towards the stars, and since it was the first civilian funded space launch, it truly was for all mankind. Financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and flown by veteran test pilot Mike Melvill, it blazed a trail for others to follow into near space and beyond.

Reaching just over 100 kilometers, hitting a speed in excess of Mach 3, the test flight was a great success, though the "flight was not perfect," as designer Rutan pointed out. At some point during the flight a fairing that had been newly installed to accommodate a larger rocket engine nozzle buckled, possibly causing a large bang heard by Melvill during his ascent. There were other flight anomalies. When the engine lit off, the space plane rolled left, then right, to nearly 90 degrees in each direction, but Mike was able to recover from it to continue the flight. The trim controls failed to work at hypersonic speeds, and the pilot had to switch over to his backup systems, and causing him to go outside the "box" of airspace they had planned for the flight. After 75 seconds of thrust the automatic cutoff shut down the engine and it coasted into space.

Space, as defined by international law, is anything more 50 miles above Earth. NASA's standards define "space" with more engineering precision: a height of 100 kilometers. Early reports indicate that the ship inched over that standard, but Scaled Composite's engineers will be poring over the data to make certain they cracked the barrier, needed for a later run at the $10 million X Prize, which requires two flights to 100 km in the space of two weeks.

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