On October 4, 2004 — the 47th anniversary of Sputnik — a small, white aircraft climbed to 112 kilometres above the Mojave Desert, briefly reached space, and returned safely to Earth. It was the third such flight in five days. The pilot was different each time but the aircraft was the same: SpaceShipOne, built by Scaled Composites and funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, on a total budget of about $25 million. NASA had spent $1.7 billion on its X-33 programme, which was cancelled without ever reaching space. SpaceShipOne did it for 1.5% of that cost.

By completing two flights to space within two weeks, SpaceShipOne’s team — led by Burt Rutan, the same designer who built the Voyager — claimed the $10 million Ansari X Prize and opened a new chapter in aviation history: the era of private human spaceflight. The government monopoly on taking human beings above the atmosphere was over. The story of how it happened is, like most great aviation stories, one of obsessive engineering and barely controlled risk.

The Prize That Changed Everything

The Ansari X Prize was modelled explicitly on the Orteig Prize that Lindbergh had claimed in 1927: a fixed sum offered to the first private team to achieve a specific goal, with no government funding permitted. The goal was to build and fly a reusable spacecraft capable of carrying three people (or equivalent ballast) to 100 kilometres altitude — the internationally recognised boundary of space — twice within two weeks. The $10 million prize was announced in 1996. By 2004, 26 teams from seven countries had entered.

Burt Rutan’s team had an unusual approach. Rather than launching from the ground — which requires enormous fuel expenditure just to climb through the atmosphere — SpaceShipOne was air-launched from a specially designed mothership, White Knight, at 47,000 feet. From there, a hybrid rocket motor burned for 84 seconds, accelerating the spacecraft to Mach 3 and carrying it above the 100-kilometre Kármán line. The reentry used a “feathering” system: the tail section rotated to create drag, slowing the spacecraft automatically without requiring guidance — a design Rutan described as “carefree reentry.”

The Rolls and the Near-Disasters

The X Prize flights were not smooth. On the first qualifying flight, June 21, 2004, SpaceShipOne began rolling uncontrollably during the rocket burn — completing 29 rolls before the pilot, Mike Melvill, could stop it. He reached space, deployed the feathering mechanism, and landed safely. On the second qualifying flight, September 29, a trim malfunction caused similar uncommanded rolls. Pilot Brian Binnie corrected it. Both flights counted for the prize.

The second prize flight, October 4, was piloted by Binnie and went perfectly. He reached 112 kilometres — breaking the altitude record for a winged aircraft that had been held by the X-15 since 1963. SpaceShipOne landed to a crowd of 35,000 people who had come to the Mojave Desert to watch. The prize was claimed.

The Industry It Started

Richard Branson had been watching. The day SpaceShipOne claimed the X Prize, Virgin Galactic was announced — a commercial space tourism company that would use a scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne to carry paying passengers to space. Twenty years later, Virgin Galactic had flown more than 800 people to space on its VSS Unity vehicle. Blue Origin, SpaceX, and dozens of smaller companies had entered the commercial space launch market.

SpaceShipOne itself is now in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, hanging above the museum’s main hall alongside the Wright Flyer and the Spirit of St. Louis and the Voyager. It is the youngest aircraft in that collection. It is also, in the arc of aviation history that began with Abbas ibn Firnas on a mountain above Córdoba, perhaps the most consequential step since Kitty Hawk: the moment when space stopped being the exclusive territory of governments and became, at least in principle, available to anyone who could build the machine to get there.

Sources: Julian Guthrie, How to Make a Spaceship (2016); Wikipedia, “SpaceShipOne”, “Ansari X Prize”; Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum