Scaled Composites announced the selection Thursday of SpaceDev of Poway, California as the vendor of choice to supply key elements of the SpaceShipOne's hybrid rocket motor.

The selection moves closer the day when SpaceShipOne will attempt to power itself to the edge of space. The craft is being designed to make suborbital flights in order to snag the $10 million X Prize -- a competition to help spur public sector space travel.

Under the watchful eye of aerospace maverick and head of Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan, a team of aero-rocket experts have carried out a step-by-step program to ready SpaceShipOne for its maiden trek to suborbital heights. The White Knight carrier plane, as has SpaceShipOne, have already undergone a number of shakeout flights.

It was stiff competition between Environmental Aeroscience Corporation (eAc) of Miami and SpaceDev. Both firms were also tasked with conducting the ground firing tests of their motor systems in a Scaled Composites test facility at its Mojave, California locale.

In June 2002, Scaled Composites picked eAc to supply the components at the tanks' front end: the nitrous fill, vent and dump system components and associated plumbing. Both vendors continued the development of all the other propulsion components.

Transformational technology

Jim Benson, founding Chairman and Chief Executive of SpaceDev, was elated by the decision. The competition to become the exclusive provider of components for the hybrid rocket motor had been underway for nearly two years, he said.

"The good thing about this is that we're no longer competing," Benson told SPACE.com. During that competition, the Scaled Composites team made sure that no one motor group had proprietary information about the other. "So this decision lifts a little bit of weight off of everybody's shoulders," he said.

"We're doing transformational technology and this victory brings home that point," Benson said.

The scale of the hybrid motor, Benson said, is almost directly suitable for the second stage of SpaceDev's Streaker launch vehicle. That booster would be capable of tossing 1,000 pounds (455 kilograms) of payload into low Earth orbit. Benson's group, under an Air Force Research Laboratory's small launch vehicle contract, is developing the Streaker. The core first stage of Streaker may be test fired next summer, he said.

In a Scaled Composites press release, details of the ground firing development program were released.

A series of hybrid motor firings started in November 2002 with a 15 second run by the SpaceDev team and ended early this month with a 90-second run by eAc.

"Both vendors demonstrated full design-duration firings during the nine-month development phase. All tests have exclusively used 100% flight hardware, with no boilerplate components and both vendors' motor systems met the contracted performance. The tests validated the inherent safety of hybrid type motors, with no instances of structural failure, hot-gas breach, explosion or other anomaly that would have put SpaceShipOne in jeopardy," the press release explains.

Because both teams were so closely matched, and since both have developed satisfactory motors, the process to select one vendor to enter the motor qualification and flight test phase was difficult, the Scaled Composites release adds.

Although no flight schedule for SpaceShipOne has been announced, the company "now looks forward to entering into the historic phase of private manned space flight," today's statement concludes.