Historic blast-off for first private spaceship

A SMALL rocket plane will power into a steep climb over California’s Mojave desert later this month and, all going well, fly into history as the first private manned space vehicle.

The 25ft-long SpaceShipOne, developed by the pioneering aerospace company Scaled Composites, will soar into sub-orbital space, 62 miles above the Earth, in a bid to be the first non-government built and sponsored piloted craft to leave the atmosphere.

The folding-wing rocket plane has already taken commercial space travel some 40 miles closer to reality - on 13 May, piloted by Mike Melvill, it attained 211,400ft, the highest altitude attained by a private aerospace programme.

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Yesterday, Scaled Composites announced that on 21 June, weather permitting, the little plane will be carried to about 50,000ft by its turbojet carrier aircraft, White Knight, before being released into a glide. Once the pilot (still to be named) fires its rocket motor, it will accelerate to Mach 3 in a vertical climb, then coast to a height of 62 miles before dropping back towards the Earth.

Although the flight will be sub-orbital, not attaining the speed required for continuous Earth orbit, at the 62-mile mark, the pilot, like any astronaut, will experience weightlessness for more than three minutes and will be able to view the black sky of space.

Both the striking-looking aircraft, SpaceShipOne and the White Knight, are the unconventional designs of the California-based aerospace visionary Burt Rutan, in partnership with the billionaire founder of Microsoft and space travel enthusiast Paul G Allen, who has invested between $20 and $30 million (11 to 16 million) in the project and whose Vulcan firm has been involved in its research and development.

If the solo flight is successful, SpaceShipOne will compete for the $10 million Ansari X-Prize, an international competition aimed at "jump-starting" a space tourism industry. The prize, instigated by Peter Diamandis, an aerospace engineer, will go to the first privately-developed and launched craft to carry a pilot and two passengers into sub-orbital space, return safely, then repeat the flight within a fortnight.

Scaled Composites is seen as the front-runner among 24 entries from seven countries, including three British contenders - Bristol Spaceplanes, Flight Exploration and Starchaser Industries.

As it is, however, this month’s solo flight, if successful, will chalk up a milestone in the quest for affordable, commercial space travel.

"Every time SpaceShipOne flies, we demonstrate that relatively modest amounts of private funding can significantly increase the boundaries of commercial space technology. Burt Rutan and his team have accomplished amazing things by conducting the first mission of this kind without any government backing," said Mr Allen.

Mr Rutan has produced a succession of highly unorthodox aircraft with his Mojave-based company. These include Voyager, which in 1986 made the first non-stop, non-refuelled flight around the world with a crew of two, and, more recently, the similarly distinctive-looking Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, in which the adventurer Steve Fosset hopes to achieve the first solo circumnavigation of the globe without refuelling, with funding from Richard Branson.

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"Without the entrepreneur approach, space access would continue to be out of reach for ordinary citizens. The SpaceShipOne flights will change all that and encourage others to usher in a new, low-cost era in space travel," said Mr Rutan.

Although the space tourists, Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth flew in Russian Soyuz craft to the International Space Station at a cost of about 12 million each, a commercial space travel sector has failed to materialise. However, some experts believe that it is the private sector, rather than government agencies such as NASA, which could ultimately carry the torch of manned space exploration.

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