Take off - commercial space travel a reality

October 5, 2004 - 8:02AM

Commerical astronaut Michael Melvill atop the private manned rocketship SpaceShipOne which he flew into suborbital space, upon his safe return at Mojave Airport in California.
Photo: Robyn Beck

Ushering in an era of commercial space travel, a private manned rocketship blasted into space today for the second time in five days, winning a $US10 million ($A13.82 million) prize and setting a sub-orbital altitude record.

In a flawless mission, SpaceShipOne, piloted by former US navy test pilot Brian Binnie, reached an altitude of 114 kilometres, according to preliminary radar readings.

"Today we made history," said Peter Diamandis, president of the Ansari X Prize Foundation, which offered the prize for the first privately-built manned spacecraft to carry out sub-orbital flight twice within two weeks.

"Today the winners are the people of Earth," he said as SpaceShipOne was towed towards a cheering crowd of spectators. "Today we go to the stars.

"We blew the X-15 away," Diamandis added in a reference to SpaceShipOne breaking the record for sub-orbital flight set by the X-15 rocket plane more than 40 years ago.

The X-15, jointly developed by NASA and the US military, set an altitude record of 108 kilometres on its August 22, 1963 flight.

As SpaceShipOne touched down here today, its designer, aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, stood alongside British tycoon Richard Branson and Diamandis on the tarmac of Mojave airport leaping for joy and cheering the historic feat.

Branson, owner of Virgin Airways, last week announced plans to join the private space race using a craft based on SpaceShipOne.

He described today's flight as a "magnificent achievement" and said he was looking forward to receiving the first five spacecraft for his "Virgin Galactic" spaceline by 2007.

To win the X Prize, the same reusable manned spacecraft needed to make two journeys into space within two weeks while carrying the equivalent weight of two passengers.

Rutan was jubiliant over the success of the flight and smashing the record of the X-15. "We did indeed go after breaking the X-15 record set in 1963 and we beat it by a full 4 kilometres," he said.

Rutan, long an outspoken adversary of the major US aerospace companies and NASA, cocked a victorious snoot at his rivals, deriding what he called the "Boeings, the Lockheeds, the naysayers in Houston."

"If they got a look at how this flight was run and how we developed the capabilities of this ship and its safety I think they would look at each other right now and say 'I'm screwed,"' he said.

SpaceshipOne was only the start of his quest for out-of-this-world travel, he said, and vowed to develop space tourism craft for Branson that would be "at least 100 times safer than anything that is ever flown into space."

Binnie, the 51-year-old pilot, described the flight as a "a dream come true."

"I'm riding on the coattails of some giants here," he said referring to Rutan and the world's only other private astronaut, Mike Melvill, who flew SpaceShipOne on a successful test flight on June 21 and on the first leg of its X Prize bid here on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the craft rolled dozens of times at speeds of around 2,700 kilometres per hour, corkscrewing through the sky.

But there were no such problems on Monday and Binnie managed to ignite the rocket engine for a total of 84 seconds, five seconds more than Melvill on Wednesday.

Among the VIPs heretoday was the head of the US Federal Aviation Administration, Marion Blakey, who is responsible for regulating the spaceship. "It's a historic thing, the beginning of personal transportation into space," she said.

SpaceShipOne was designed and built by Rutan, who joined forces with Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen.

Rutan selected the October 4 date to coincide with the 47th anniversary of the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union's first satellite, Sputnik I, which sparked the original space race between Moscow and Washington.

Organisers who proposed the competition hope it will spawn an age of space travel rivalling the dawn of commercial air transport in the late 1920s.

The X Prize, funded by private donors, was established in 1996 and modelled on the $US25,000 ($A34,554.25) Orteig prize that aviator Charles Lindbergh won when he became the first solo pilot to cross the Atlantic in 1927.

His feat gave birth to airlines and allowed ordinary people to fly.


Advertisement Advertisement