Allen-funded rocketship rolls into space

By John Antczak
The Associated Press

LAURA RAUCH / AP Astronaut Mike Melvill waves from SpaceShipOne following his quick flight into space and successful landing back to the Mojave Airport.

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SpaceShipOne, with astronaut Michael Melvill at the controls, dropped away from its mother ship above Mojave Airport, fired its rocket and pulled into a vertical climb.

During its 81-minute flight, the ship climbed to an unofficial altitude of more than 330,000 feet — about 2,000 feet above its target altitude of 62 miles.

"Now that was fun," astronaut Michael Melvill said after the ship completed its gliding descent and landed safely at Mojave Airport. "I thought I really nailed it."

But the craft made more than two dozen unexpected rolls during its ascent, corkscrewing upward.

SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan said controllers had asked Melvill to shut the engine down early because of the rolling problem, but Melvill kept going until he was certain he would reach the target altitude.

"We actually were asking him to go ahead and abort, to shut it off to where he wouldn't have gone (the 62 miles)," Rutan said. "He stayed in there just for a handful of seconds more."

	ROBERT LABERGE / GETTY IMAGES SpaceShipOne is escorted by a small plane as it approaches for its landing at the Mojave Airport after completing a successful flight.

SpaceShipOne is trying for the $10 million X Prize, offered to whomever makes two flights 62 miles high, an altitude generally accepted as being in space, in two weeks or less.

Melvill also was the pilot in June, when the ship made its first trip into space ever by a private spacecraft. To win the X Prize, the plane still needs to make a second successful flight within the two-week time frame.

Before today's takeoff, SpaceShipOne's creators had ambitiously set the second flight for next Monday — well before the 14-day deadline. Rutan said the roll problem would be studied and a determination made about delaying the second flight.

Melvill said he may have caused the rolling himself.

"You're extremely busy at that point," he said. "Your feet and your hands and your eyes and everything is working about as fast as you can work them, and probably I stepped on something too quickly and caused the roll. But it's nice to do a roll at the top of the climb."

The specially designed jet with the spaceship under its belly had taken off at 7:12 a.m. from the airport in the desert north of Los Angeles and began its climb.

A crowd of VIPs watched from below the airport control tower, while journalists watched from bleachers along the runway. Spectators, some wrapped in blankets to ward off the early morning chills, erupted in cheers as the spacecraft and its chase planes taxied down the runway.

Among those watching today's launch was Adam Smith, 14, of Vienna, Va., who said he's had an interest in space "as far back as I can remember."

Rutan, the maverick aerospace designer, secretly developed SpaceShipOne with more than $20 million from Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and is well ahead of two dozen teams building other X Prize contenders around the world.

The Ansari X Prize was modeled after the $25,000 prize that Charles Lindbergh won in his Spirit of St. Louis for the first solo New York-to-Paris flight across the Atlantic in 1927.

The St. Louis-based X Prize Foundation, noting the rapid development of air travel after Lindbergh's feat, hopes to inspire an era of space tourism in which spaceflight is not just the domain of agencies such as NASA.

SpaceShipOne was required to fly with a pilot and the equivalent weight of two passengers aboard, in accordance with rules requiring X Prize contenders to be capable of carrying three people.

Even before today's flight, Richard Branson, the airline mogul and adventurer, announced in London on Monday that his Virgin Group plans to offer passenger flight into space aboard rockets based on SpaceShipOne by 2007.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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