Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne

SpaceShipOne is certainly one of the most unique and interesting aircraft ever flown. It's the world's first private spaceship! It was funded, designed, constructed and operated without any government or military assistance, using only private money, staff and pilots. Paul Allen, one of the co-founders of Microsoft, supplied the $20 million required to complete the project.

Burt Rutan and a team of about 20 people designed and built SpaceShipOne in Rutan's Scaled Composites facility. Scaled Composites is housed at the Mojave Airport located in Mojave, California about 100 miles north of Los Angeles. The Mojave Airport is just down the road from the legendary Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.

SpaceShipOne was designed and built to win the Ansari X Prize. The X Prize offered $10 million to the first private company who could send a manned aircraft into space, land it safely, then send it back into space again within two weeks. "Space" was defined as higher than 100 kilometers or 328,000 feet. SpaceShipOne's tail number is N328KF, representing 328 "K" (thousand) Feet. Airliners typically fly between 30 and 40 thousand feet, only one tenth as high as SpaceShipOne.

Besides lower level test flights, SpaceShipOne flew three times, each flight reaching higher into space. These were "sub-orbital" flights - strictly "up and down". SpaceShipOne took off and landed from the same runway and did not orbit the earth. Putting a craft into orbit around the earth requires much more energy and fuel than was available to SpaceShipOne. Orbiting was not a requirement or goal of the X Prize.

On October 4th, 2004 SpaceShipOne clinched the coveted X Prize. Below is a chronology of all three flights.

June 21, 2004

The world witnessed the dawn of a new space age today, as investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen and Scaled Composites launched the first private manned vehicle beyond the Earth's atmosphere. The successful launch demonstrated that the final frontier is now open to private enterprise.

Under the command of test pilot Mike Melvill, SpaceShipOne reached a record breaking altitude of 328,491 feet (approximately 62 miles or 100 km), making Melvill the first civilian to fly a spaceship out of the atmosphere and the first private pilot to earn astronaut wings.

September 29, 2004

At 8:13 this morning PDT, SpaceShipOne (SS1) coasted above the 100 km altitude point and successfully completed the first of two X-Prize flights. The peak altitude reached was 337,500 feet. The engine was shut down when the pilot, Mike Melvill, noted that his altitude predictor exceeded the required 100 km mark. The motor burn lasted 77 seconds – 1 second longer than on the June 21st flight. Melvill was prepared to burn the motor up to 89 seconds, which indicates significant additional performance remains in SS1.

October 4, 2004

On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne rocketed into history, becoming the first private manned spacecraft to exceed an altitude of 328,000 feet twice within the span of a 14 day period, thus claiming the ten million dollar Ansari X-Prize.

In addition to meeting the altitude requirement to win the X-Prize, pilot Brian Binnie also broke the August 22, 1963 record by Joseph A. Walker, who flew the X-15 to an unofficial world altitude record of 354,200 feet. Brian Binnie's SpaceShipOne flight carried him all the way to 367,442 feet or 69.6 miles above the Earth's surface.

We invite you to explore the rest of our site for more information about SpaceShipOne and particularly our exciting new DVD that allows you to be there on the ground as SpaceShipOne makes its historic flights.