The flight marked the first time an aerospace program had successfully completed a piloted mission without government sponsorship.
Momentum carried the day
On the June 21 flight day, SpaceShipOne was released at 47,000 feet from underneath the White Knight carrier airplane. The SpaceShipOnes hybrid rocket motor quickly roared to life, burning for 76 seconds, according to the Scaled Composites flight log.
The hybrid rocket engine propelled pilot Melvill and the SpaceShipOne to 2.9 Mach (2,150 miles per hour), or nearly three times the speed of sound. At motor burn out, SpaceShipOne was at 180,000 feet, with momentum carrying the craft the rest of the way into space and reaching a height, or apogee, of 328,491 feet (62.2 statute miles), or 100.1 kilometers.
Melvill experienced weightlessness for approximately 3 minutes as the vehicle slowly decelerated to apogee. During the descent, with SpaceShipOnes novel tail section flipped up to feathered position, the pilot experienced forces greater than five times the Earths gravity as the vehicle accelerated again to 2.9 Mach. Melvill reconfigured the vehicle back to a glider configuration at 57,000 feet and over the next 20 minutes made a descent to a runway landing at Mojave -- recently tagged as Americas first inland Spaceport.
Flight control malfunction
The mission of SpaceShipOne did encounter a problem during the historic flight -- suffering a flight control malfunction, forcing quick reaction by pilot Melvill.
According to Scaled Composites, late in the rocket planes boost phase, the primary pitch trim control aboard the craft 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, the firms flight log explains. So when the failure occurred, test pilot Melvill switched to the backup system and continued the planned mission.
However, Scaled Composites noted that the resulting trajectory excursion had two effects: For one, the vehicle did not climb as high as planned -- to a pre-launch altitude target of 360,000 feet (68.2 statute miles), or 110 kilometers. Secondly, the rocket ship re-entered south of the intended recovery point.
This latter effect, while undesirable, was well within the vehicle's glide capability, Scaled Composites reports, and SpaceShipOne had no difficulty flying back to the Mojave Airport, turned spaceport for a normal landing. An estimated 11,000 onlookers cheered as the rocket plane glided to a Mojave Airport runway stop.
X Prize next?
At a post-landing press briefing on June 21, Burt Rutan, head of Scaled Composites said a decision on whether a 60-day notice would be forthcoming regarding future back-to-back flights needed to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize. He did not discount the possibility of another shakeout flight, prior to the dual attempts to snag the cash prize.
SpaceShipOne is a contender among a worldwide cadre of teams vying for the Ansari X Prize, patterned after the Orteig Prize that spurred American aviator Charles Lindbergh to make his historic trans-Atlantic flight in 1927.
For a group to claim the prize they must fly a privately financed and built craft able to propel three people up to 62.5 miles (a little over 100 kilometers) altitude, return safely to Earth, and then repeat that trip within a two week period.
Several teams are also nearing flight readiness to make runs for the purse before the Ansari X Prize expires on January 1, 2005.
Redefining space travel
Following the June 21 flight of SpaceShipOne, Rutan stated in a press release:
Today's flight marks a critical turning point in the history of aerospace," Rutan said. We have redefined space travel as we know it.
Rutan added: "Our success proves without question that manned space flight does not require mammoth government expendituresit can be done by a small company operating with limited resources and a few dozen dedicated employees."
Paul Allen, Microsoft tycoon and sole sponsor of the SpaceShipOne project explained in a post-landing statement: Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites are part of a new generation of explorers who are sparking the imagination of a huge number of people worldwide and ushering in the birth of a new industry of privately funded manned space flight.
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