A Merlin engine built to power Space Exploration Technologies' Falcon rockets undergoes test firing in McGregor, Texas.
Photo: Thom Rogers/Space Exploration Technologies** View Slideshow 
SpaceShipOne, designed by Burt Rutan and built by his company, Scaled Composites, broke the government monopoly on human spaceflight in 2004 and won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in the process.
Below is an excerpt describing that winning flight from Wired News reporter Michael Belfiore's new book, Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space, © 2007 by Michael Belfiore. Reprinted by permission of Smithsonian Books/Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
The final X Prize flight, X2, carried the highest stakes of any SpaceShipOne flight. Far more rode on it than the $10 million prize. Rutan wanted to start the first commercial spaceline, and the means with which to do it lay almost within his grasp. Richard Branson waited with pen poised over checkbook to give him the capital to build a fleet of passenger spaceships for his newly formed Virgin Galactic.
Gallery: Inside the Rocketeers’ Rides
Accidents Won't Stop Private Space Industry's Push to Final Frontier
But wealthy space tourists weren't going to fork over $190,000 to ride a twitchy experimental spaceship with an unfortunate propensity for flying off course, spinning while traveling faster than a rifle bullet, or cracking up on landing. To seal the deal on a new space age and win development money from Branson on top of the $10 million X Prize, SpaceShipOne had to demonstrate something it had never done before: that it was capable of a perfect spaceflight, one that would give passengers the thrill of a lifetime without scaring the hell out of them.
Pilot Brian Binnie didn't sleep much the night before the flight, and as early as his preflight briefing was, at 4:30 a.m., it couldn't have come soon enough for him. He got to the Scaled hangar at 4:00.
At dawn on Monday, October 4, 2004, the White Knight, with Mike Melvill at the controls and SpaceShipOne project engineer Matt Steinmetz in the back seat and the spaceship hooked to its belly with Binnie inside, taxied down the flight line. Once again Binnie was awed by the number of people who had turned out to see SpaceShipOne scratch the sky. But this was the first time he'd seen the crowds from the cockpit of SpaceShipOne. "I hope I have a good day," he thought, "because there are an awful lot of people there!"
Just as the red light of dawn began to spill over the Tehachapi Mountains, the mated ships turned at the end of the flight line to face back the way they had come. Melvill throttled up the White Knight's engines, and the two ships picked up speed until they roared past the crowds and leaped into the sky. Then Binnie settled in for the long wait while they circled to launch altitude. When they got there, Binnie clasped his hands in front of him, closed his eyes, and breathed a silent prayer.
Melvill flipped the switch in White Knight's cockpit that unlocked the hooks securing the spaceship. A light glowed amber on his instrument panel. "Okay, I got one yellow," he radioed.
Binnie toggled an identical switch on his panel.
"And I've got two yellows," called Melvill. "And stand by with thirty seconds. . . . Twenty seconds to go. . . . Ten seconds. You ready, Matt? Three, two, one, release."
Steinmetz pulled the release lever, and SpaceShipOne fell free of the White Knight.
Binnie hit the switches to arm and then fire the rocket motor in quick succession. "I didn't waste any time," he later recalled. "It was release, arm, fire, boom."
In the White Knight Melvill and Steinmetz were still close enough to actually hear the rocket motor fire, something the White Knight crews hadn't been able to do on previous missions. Melvill banked the White Knight hard right as SpaceShipOne screamed past. "Holy crap, that was close!" blurted Steinmetz over the intercom.
In the simulator, the spaceship pilots couldn't hit the White Knight on ignition if they tried, so they had stopped worrying about that possibility as they raced to light the rocket motor closer and closer to drop time -- the faster they could fire the motor, the higher they would go before shutdown. "You drop off with the trims set for a pretty aggressive turn," Binnie explained later. "Getting the nose up quickly means all that rocket thrust is giving you altitude as opposed to just accelerating you out horizontally. That's goodness."
"Good light," he gasped out as SpaceShipOne's rocket motor slammed him back into his seat with the force of 3 g's. The ship pitched up as it accelerated, hitting the speed of sound in about ten seconds. The craft shook and vibrated as it crossed the sound barrier. By the end of the first minute of the rocket burn, the ship was traveling three times the speed of sound, faster than any civilian craft ever built.
At this point the ship's oxidizer tank began feeding gaseous nitrous oxide to the rocket motor instead of the liquid nitrous it had delivered until now. This was as expected, and Binnie was ready for the resulting apoplectic shuddering of the craft. The ride smoothed out after about four seconds, and that was Binnie's cue to find out if all of his hard work in the simulator over the last few days was going to pay off.
"More with the pitch up, Brian," Doug Shane prompted him from mission control.
Now, while the trim stabs still had some tenuous wisps of air to dig into, Binnie thumbed the trim control way back to get the nose up to 88 degrees from the horizontal.
Shane called out the altitude the ship would coast to if Binnie shut down the rocket now. "300,000. . . . Three-two-eight." Burt Rutan, sitting beside Shane in mission control grinned. "That's three-two-eight," repeated Shane. Three hundred twenty-eight thousand feet. If the motor shut down now, the ship would coast to 100 kilometers, the X Prize altitude. Now all Binnie had to do to claim the prize was get back down in one piece.
"Copy that," returned Binnie.
"Three-fifty. Suggest shutdown."
Eighty-three seconds after Binnie had fired the rocket motor, he hit the switch to shut it off. He was at 213,000 feet then and still climbing, sailing upwards on momentum, absolutely straight and true, and without a hint of a roll. The new flight procedures had worked flawlessly.
The instant the howling of the engine cut off, Binnie found himself weightless, with no sense of up or down. All the tension left his body. He sailed into a black sky completely devoid of stars. He felt, he wrote later, as though he had stepped across a threshold into an entirely different plane of existence, "a realm of blessed peace and quiet."
With the boost phase of the flight behind him, Binnie could take his eyes off the display that had commanded his attention since the drop, let his hands float from the controls, and just enjoy the view. And what a view it was! Ahead was the fathomless black void of space. He almost felt as much as saw it: a "vast presence, looming and yawning through the spaceship's little windows," full of both "menace and mystery."
But when he tilted his head back, the warm reassuring earth tones of the desert and mountains below greeted him. He could see a thousand miles in every direction, taking in not just the land but a wide expanse of the deep blue Pacific Ocean as well, along with swirling brilliant white cloud cover, even entire weather patterns, and, on the horizon, a thin, gently curving band of electric blue that was the atmosphere -- all that separated the Earth from black infinity. That view, Binnie said later, "is pretty special. But the way you get there, you know, it's such a feeling. It's like somebody's taking the cymbals at the end of a symphony and going po-WHAM!"
As SpaceShipOne sailed free of Earth's bounds, Binnie hit the controls that activated what he called the angel's wings -- Rutan's "feather" that would allow the ship to reenter the atmosphere safely. The ship split itself in half, with the twin tail booms hinging upward until they locked into place almost at a perpendicular angle to the rest of the ship.
Back in mission control, as the feather locked into position, Richard Branson shook Paul Allen's hand, acknowledging the handoff from Allen's spaceship development program to Branson's commercial spaceline venture. That moment marked the end of the beginning of the commercial space age.
Accidents Won't Stop Private Space Industry's Push to Final Frontier
