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First Commercial "Spacecraft" Set To Clinch Big Prize
Mojave (AFP) Oct 04, 2004 A privately-owned, manned US spaceship is set to blast off Monday in the final stage of an attempt to clinch a 10-million-dollar prize aimed at launching a new era of space tourism. At around 7:00 am (1400 GMT), the stubby SpaceShipOne will take off from California's Mojave desert on the belly of a specially-adapted jet to complete its prize bid with its second flight into space within two weeks. If all goes well, the craft will blast off from its carrier jet just over an hour later, breach the 328,000-foot (62-mile 100-kilometer) barrier, and return to a runway landing around 8:30 am -- thus winning the Ansari X Prize purse ahead of any of two dozen competitors. Some 30 members of the SpaceShipOne team spent Sunday night relaxing at the pyramid-shaped home of the rocket's designer, aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, in the Mojave Desert. "We're just waiting for the sun to go down and come back up again," a keyed-up Rutan, 61, told CNN television. "Probably our biggest concern is getting enough sleep," he said. "Our test team down here... has to be at a briefing at 4:30 and we gotta go fly and win 10 million bucks," he said to cheers from colleagues. Organisers who proposed the competition hope it will spawn an age of space travel rivalling the dawn of commercial air transport in the late 1920s. "What we finally have here, after 40 years of waiting, is the beginning of the personal space flight revolution," said Peter Diamandis, president of the X Prize foundation. SpaceShipOne in June became the world's first ever manned space vessel not funded by a government, shifting the paradigm of celestial exploration and marking the start of a new space race. Wednesday, test pilot Mike Melvill took it on its second successful -- if hair-raising -- foray out of the earth's atmosphere that simultaneously bedazzled and horrified onlookers. After a heart-stopping corkscrew ride into the sky, SpaceShipOne burst out of the earth's atmosphere and reached an altitude of 37,500 feet, or 103 kilometers (64 miles), qualifying for the last phase of the competition. Melvill then glided the craft back to earth for a text-book landing, before proclaiming a "near perfect" flight, despite his unintentional "victory roll" that saw SpaceShipOne spin up to two dozen times during its ascent. Travelling at speeds of up to 3,500 kilometers (2,100 miles) an hour, SpaceShipOne's seemingly uncontrollable rolls spooked television viewers across the world. Rutan said the spins were not likely to be repeated Monday. "Obviously we have some stability issues. We believe that we have solved them and I don't believe you'll see the rolls tomorrow. But if we do, we don't believe they're dangerous. "They only happen at the highest mach numbers and they only happen at a special condition which we intend to avoid on the flight tomorrow."
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