Category Space Ship One

After resolving the avionics malfunction that caused the aborted glide flight, SpaceShipOne and White Knight were back up flying again the very same day. Melvill was dropped at 48,200 feet (14,690 meters) from White Knight flying at a speed of 105 knots. For his first maneuver, he put SpaceShipOne into a full stall to investigate stall characteristics.

The second maneuver was one of the most critical firsts of the entire flight test program. Evaluation of the feather would begin on this flight. The purpose of the feather was to decelerate SpaceShipOne during reentry into the atmosphere.

“That’s something you do in glide tests,” Burt Rutan said. “You don’t have to do that in spaceflight because once you decelerate from your spaceflight, you find yourself in a stable glide, which is identical to the way we flew the airplane on its first glide flight. So, we went out early in the program and put the feather up and put it down.”

Rutan had planned to do a high-speed pull-up in a glide flight and put the feather up as it peaked to simulate zero-g during the beginning of the program. But this turned out unnecessary and would have used up too much altitude. “We started off at 43,000 feet [13,110 meters] and put the feather up to make sure it flew the way we wanted,” Doug Shane said. “We ended up doing feather

Flight Test Log Excerpt for 5G

Date: 27 August 2003

Flight Number Pilot/Flight Engineer

SpaceShipOne 5G Mike Melvill

White Knight 32L Brian Binnie/Cory Bird

Objective: Same objectives as the aborted flight 31LC/4GC earlier today. Second glide flight of SpaceShipOne. Flying qualities and performance in the spaceship reentry or "feather" mode. Pilot workload and situational awareness while transitioning and handling qualities assessment when reconfigured. As a glider, stall investigation both at high and low altitude and envelope expansion out to 200 knots and 4 g’s. More aggressive, lateral directional characteristics including adverse yaw, roll rate effectiveness and control, including 360 degrees aileron roll, and full rudder side slips.

(source: Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, provided courtesy of Scaled Composites)

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deployments from tail-slide entries, and it just worked great. Everything was as good as we could have possibly hoped for.”

SpaceShipOne was gliding along at an airspeed of 90 knots when Melvill unlocked and activated the feather. As the tail booms began to elevate to their fully extended position of 65 degrees, the nose of SpaceShipOne pitched up but settled back to a near-level pitch. Melvill encountered a lot of buzzing and buffeting during the 70-second feathered descent.

With the feather deployed, SpaceShipOne dropped at a rate greater than 10,000 feet per minute [3,050 meters per minute]. However, it was extremely stable as it fell to the ground belly first.

“You could change the heading,” Mike Melvill said. “If you were pointing at Cal City, you could turn around and point it to Mojave. And you used the elevons to do that. It was kind of weird because normally it would roll, but your sensation was that it was yawing.”

“If you stepped on the rudders, it wasn’t perceptible to you what was happening. Nothing happened. The only thing that really did anything was lateral spin. It was kind of neat to go over and look at a different view, and look over there and see what was over there. We did that a lot when we were flying as a glider in the atmosphere.”

At 30,000 feet (9,140 meters) Melvill retracted and locked down the feather. SpaceShipOne was back as a glider, as shown in figure 7.6. He expanded the flight envelope for airspeed and g-force. And before landing, he executed SpaceShipOne’s first roll.

n November 6, 2004, the X Prize Foundation presented the Ansari X Prize trophy and the $10 million. Figure 10.1 shows Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Mike Melvill, and Brian Binnie with members of the X Prize Foundation, Peter Diamandis, Gregg Maryniak, Amir Ansari, and Bob Weiss holding up the prize money. In order to also join in the celebration, Allen had flown the entire Scaled Composites team in one of his private airliners to the award ceremony held in St. Louis. Figure 10.2 shows the Scaled Composites team from an earlier photograph.

SpaceShipOne and the Ansari X Prize began on two separate but parallel courses. When they converged, their combined importance was greater than the sum of the two parts. It is difficult to imagine what the result would have been if SpaceShipOne or the Ansari X Prize had been taken out of the equation. Would another team have won the Ansari X Prize with the deadline and the funding set to expire in just a few months? Would the general public have had the awareness or been as involved to the degree that it was without the Ansari X Prize? Without the space mania would investors like Sir Richard Branson have embraced Rutan with such a sizable financial commitment?

The years 1996 to 2004 were very much a different time compared to the years 1919 to 1927. And although the Ansari X Prize was modeled after the Orteig Prize, it certainly was not a one-to-one substitution. At the end of the day, the X Prize Foundation did what they had to do to realize their dream. At the end of the day, Scaled Composites did what they had to do to realize theirs.

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Fig. 10.1. The Ansari X Prize trophy and $10 million check were presented on November 6, 2004, to Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the official partnership between Paul Allen’s Vulcan and Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites. The photograph shows Bob Weiss, Gregg Maryniak, Amir Ansari, Peter Diamandis, Brian Binnie, Mike Melvill, Burt Rutan, and Paul Allen (left to right) at the award ceremony hosted in St. Louis. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composite

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Fig. 10.2. In the Mojave Desert, which is referred to as the birthplace of the sonic boom, Scaled Composites, a small company founded by Burt Rutan in 1982, grew from an innovator in aircraft to an innovator in spacecraft. Without the efforts of the whole team, SpaceShipOne would never have been able to burst through Earth’s atmosphere and truly become a spaceship. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composites

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Fig. 10.3. Influenced by the success of the Ansari X Prize, NASA announced the Centennial Challenges in 2005. John Carmack’s Armadillo Aerospace, an Ansari X Prize competitor, just missed winning the Lunar Lander Challenge in 2006. The lander, shown here, demonstrated vertical takeoff, hover, horizontal translation, and vertical descent, but it couldn’t stick the landing in the end. Dan Linehan

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It is safe to say that those who have dreamed of someday flying into space had their chances become much, much better because of Rutan and the Ansari X Prize, whether it be on a ride in SpaceShipTwo with Virgin Galactic or in another suborbital spacecraft from a different spaceline.

Just as the X Prize Foundation faced challenges to keep the prize going, the individual teams faced similar problems. The biggest of these was funding. It wasn’t so much of a technology challenge that the teams had to overcome—the technology to get into space had been around for a long time. The teams were not starting from square one. In fact, with modern materials and computers, a technical leap wouldn’t likely be the limiting factor.

Rutan and his team certainly seemed to be in a very good position. “Some viewed him as the frontrunner,” Diamandis recalled. “Lessons of history are that sometimes the frontrunner doesn’t win. In the Orteig Prize for example, the frontrunner was Admiral Byrd, the first person to fly to the North Pole. He crashed on liftoff. This young upstart, unknown to the rest of the world, Charles Lindbergh, comes along and wins the competition.”

A total of twenty-six teams registered for the Ansari X Prize, representing seven different countries, but not every team that applied made it in. “We probably turned away about half the appli­cations we received,” explained Diamandis. “We required the teams to really demonstrate to us the seriousness of their team and effort. They had to demonstrate by virtue of the people who were involved, the companies who were involved, and they had to show us the primary concept.

“We had numerous teams apply with antigravity and UFO tech­nology. My answer was simple: ‘My office is on the second floor. If you can float up to the second floor, I’m happy to register you.’ ”

Some of the teams that competed did get vehicles into the air and performed flight tests to various degrees, while some hadn’t had the resources necessary to get their programs very far off the ground. Two of the top contenders were Steve Bennett’s Starchaser out of England and Brian Feeney’s da Vinci Project out of Canada, refer to figure 2.13 and figure 2.14, respectively.

“Steve Bennett was the first person to fly an X Prize vehicle, or a vehicle with X Prize logos on it, called Nova, which was the first launch in like thirty years out of the UK,” Diamandis said.

Launched on November 22, 2001, Nova weighed in at 1,643 pounds (747 kilograms). It was unmanned, but the capsule was designed to fit one person. Starchaser had actually developed and launched rockets beginning in 1993, well before the Ansari X Prize was announced, so it was one of the more established teams.

“I didn’t want to apply for the X Prize competition and come across as someone who was ill equipped to deal with it,” said Steve Bennett, the team leader of Starchaser. “It took me about a year to get all my ducks in a row. And we made the application, and Peter accepted it no problem.”

A bigger vehicle was still needed, since the Ansari X Prize required it to fit three people. “We went through a number of ideas and over the years the design evolved,” continued Bennett. “And what happened was it just got simpler and simpler and simpler. So, we

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Fig. 2.13. Having launched over sixteen large rockets since 1993, Starchaser was one of the more experienced teams competing for the Ansari X Prize. Even after the Ansari X Prize, Starchaser rocket development continues.

In 2007, Starchaser won a study contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to further investigate reusable launch vehicles for space tourism. Courtesy of Starchaser Industries

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Fig. 2.14. To avoid the high cost of developing a ground-launched rocket

or a carrier aircraft, Brian Feeney’s da Vinci Project built the world’s largest balloon, capable of holding 3.70 million cubic feet (0.10 million cubic meters) of helium, to lift its Wild Fire rocket to a launch altitude of 70,000 feet (21,340 meters). Brian Feeney, the da Vinci Project

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The rocket had three main components: a booster, which was the Starchaser 5 rocket powered by liquid oxygen (LOX) and kerosene fuel engines; the capsule, which was called Thunderstar; and the launch escape system.

Figure 2.15 shows Bennett standing next to the Nova 2 after piloted drop tests from 10,000 feet (3,050 meters) were conducted.

Bennett admitted, “The biggest challenge was, I guess, raising the finances, because the technology to do this kind of thing has been around since the 1950s, possibly even the 1940s.”

So, the team had to be creative. Back in 2000, they had pre-sold two of the seats for when they would first attempt the Ansari X Prize.

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Fig. 2.15. Steve Bennett stands next to Nova 2, which was drop tested from an altitude over 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) to test the parachute-recovery system. For each test, a pilot manned the capsule, which was then dropped out the back of a cargo plane. Courtesy of Starch a ser Industries

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Bennett said of the two prospective passengers, “They wanted to basically support the project. And they wanted to fly on the first flight. We got three seats in the capsule. The only condition they made was, ‘Here’s the money, Steve. We’ll give you the money. We’ll give it to you up front, and we’re not even going to come back to you. We don’t care whether it takes a year or ten years. You tell us when it’s ready. We’re not going to hassle you. There is only one condition.’ And the one condition was the third seat had to be occupied by me. Okay. So, they knew I wasn’t a nutcase. They knew that I wanted to do this project and that I wanted to come home to my family.”

The competition really began to heat up midway through 2004, when two teams each secretly notified the X Prize Foundation that they were going for it. Diamantis recalled, “People have to give both confidential notice within 120 days and public notice within 60 days of their attempt to fly. So, we had gotten confidential notice of Rutan’s flight date, and then a few weeks later we got confidential notice from Brian Feeney that the da Vinci Project was going to attempt a flight.

“We thought for a moment we might have to mount flight com­petitions in two separate nations, and funding that and doing a good job of judging was going to be a challenge for us.”

Feeney, who had an aerospace company in the 1980’s that did life – support systems, read an article about the announcement of the Ansar і X Prize while living in Hong Kong. “That was the catalyst for me,” he said. “I stopped what I was doing right away at the time.” Feeney had constantly looked for opportunities that would take him to space. He rallied one of the largest volunteer efforts for a technology project in Canadian history while using a very unconven­tional approach to reach space. At first he looked into developing a carrier aircraft like Scaled Composites had done. “We wanted to do that even before we knew what they were doing. But the cost to do that was just prohibitive. We knew we’d be challenged just to get the money to build the spaceship itself,” Feeney said.

“A ground-launched vehicle required about four times as much energy, thrust, everything else, compared to an air-launched vehicle, whether it was balloon, as in our case, or an aircraft or whatever

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Fig. 2.16. Teams had to give a 120-day confidential notice to the X Prize Foundation that they were going to make an attempt at the Ansari X Prize. As the deadline loomed, Scaled Composites gave its secret notification, and a few weeks later, the da Vinci Project also gave notice. The da Vinci Project finally got a big chunk of funding from GoldenPalace. com, but it proved to be too late in the game. Brian Feeney, the da Vinci Project

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means of getting to that altitude. At the end of the day, I thought the balloon-launch system was a good compromise with the much higher cost of developing a ground-based launch rocket.”

A rocket called Wild Fire, pointing up at 75 degrees, would be tethered to the world’s largest reusable helium balloon. Made of polyethylene, the balloon, measuring in at 150 feet (46 meters) in diameter and 200 feet (61 meters) in length, could contain 3.70 million cubic feet (0.10 million cubic meters) of helium. It would only be 15 percent full at liftoff but would expand as it ascended. The da Vinci Project had successfully tested a scaled-down version of their launch balloon before constructing the final launch balloon.

Figure 2.16 shows the Wild Fire rocket at only 80 percent complete. At an altitude of 70,000 feet (21,340 meters), which is higher than any launch aircraft could fly, Wild Fire would detach and use a hybrid fuel rocket engine to soar into space.

“I never felt in the long run that it was an ideal commercial propo­sition, because the balloon is subject to weather and a multiplicity of things. But it is a cost-effective way for a short program to demon­strate viable technology,” Feeney said.

Robert Goddard built and launched the very first liquid-fuel rocket in 1926, shown in figure 2.17, and is now considered the father of American rocketry. Yet when he first published theories about reach­ing the Moon using a rocket, he drew ridicule, so much so that he fled to the remoteness of Roswell, New Mexico, to continue his pioneer­ing research. Ironically, it was prewar Germany that seemed to take his work more seriously than did his own country.

But Goddard still had a few pretty important believers in his work. Charles Lindbergh had recognized that wings and propellers could

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Fig. 2.17. Robert Goddard was a pioneer in rocketry. In this photo from 1926, he stands next to his invention, the very first liquid-fueled rocket. His breakthroughs were, unfortunately, not enough to shield him from relentless ridicule when he asserted that a large enough rocket could reach the Moon. NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center

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Fig. 2.18. Charles Lindbergh (right) understood early on that airplanes had limitations. He was fascinated by rocketry because he knew this would be the next step. A kindred spirit, Lindbergh helped Robert Goddard (center) to get funding from the Guggenheim family. This photograph from 1935 shows Harry F. Guggenheim (left) visiting for a rocket launch. NASA-Headquarters

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Fig. 2.19. The first man-made object to reach the edge of space, the V-2, was designed and built by Germany during World War II. Thousands and thousands of these ballistic missiles rained down on cities, with Antwerp and London being the targets of the vast majority. After the war, this vengeance or terror weapon became the foundation of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and space programs of the United States and Soviet Union. NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center

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carry an aircraft only so high. Because of this, Lindbergh was very inter­ested in rocketry and in Goddard’s work. Lindbergh was able to help secure funding for Goddard from the wealthy Guggenheim family. Figure 2.18 shows Lindbergh together with Goddard and his benefac­tor for the launch of one of Goddard’s more advanced rockets.

Right after World War II, when the German rocket scientists who worked on the V-2 rockets left for the United States or Russia, the United States asked Lindbergh to go to Germany and assess what was
left of the V-2 program. Figure 2.19 shows a V-2. It was not only a weapon of war, but it also was the foundation upon which the U. S. space program was built. Even an Ansari X Prize team, Canada’s Red Arrow, used it as the basis for their spacecraft.

So, early on, Charles Lindbergh was exposed to the work of Wernher von Braun. And it was von Braun who helped the United States to reach the surface of the Moon. It is hard not to see all the connections and parallels between this and the present.

SpaceShipOne may look like an airplane, but it is actually a combination of a missile launching from an aircraft, a spaceship maneuvering above the atmosphere, and a glider drifting down to Earth. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by David M. Moore

want to apologize first off to any of my former English teachers who will have heart failure upon hearing that I actually wrote a book. I think I spelled my doom when I put a poem of mine on the first page of my master’s thesis. It wouldn’t have been so bad if my thesis was about art or literature, but it was about making superconductors with lasers and analyzing them with x-rays and electron beams. Fortunately, this book I write now is not a literary masterpiece, so, any such resulting cardiac irregularities shouldn’t last long or will perhaps be particularly mild.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to get started thanking some pretty fantastic people because without them I would have never been able to pull off a book like this. It has been a long and not so straight­forward journey to get to this point. There are more people to thank than I can reasonably do so on this page. It’s funny how things in life sometimes fall into place after a chain of events occurs that no one could have ever predicted in a million years. That’s what it’s all about, I guess.

I started writing for the California International Airshow’s event program in 2003 thanks to Cindy Rogers. I soon became editor and publisher working for Ginny Brown, who stood behind me and allowed me to create an award-winning event program in just three years. But I was far from alone in this. I met Tyson Rininger during this time. His wonderful photos filled the event programs from cover to cover. It was Tyson who got me on board with MBI. It is impossible to express my full appreciation. I am very fortunate to have been able to include Tyson’s photos of SpaceShipOne’ s first spaceflight and trip to Oshkosh.

I had the opportunity to write about SpaceShipOne and the Ansari X Prize for the Airshow. Lilian, Ray, and Cheryl hooked me up with VIP access during X2, which gave me the chance to met Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Peter Diamandis, Anousheh Ansari, and Sir Richard Branson. In addition, this book would be nowhere if it wasn’t for the tremendous support of Dave Moore from Vulcan. Dave was Paul Allen’s managing director for Tier One. He was there from the beginning for the construction and test flights of SpaceShipOne by Scale Composites. Vulcan contributed a majority of the images used in this book, and Dave shot many of them.

When I made the transition from engineering to writing, David Gitin, a creative writing instructor at Monterey Peninsula College and an incredible poet, was critical to my successful transition. His friend­ship has been invaluable. I left engineering in 2000 with one goal in mind, to write a book. Along the way, not one of my family and friends told me I was mad. They may have thought it, but at least they kept it to themselves. Mom, Dad, Steve, Rob, Jen, Joe, James, Vik, Patty, Zaheer, Pranita, Norma, Charo, Maria, Manuel, Kim, Jerrold Kortney, and, of course, the Princess of the Bottom of the World, thank you so much for understanding.

Last, it’s very difficult to express my amount of gratitude toward MBI and my editor Steve Gansen. Writing this book was more challenging than I could have ever envisioned. Steve was vital in guiding me through the process and helping me reach a dream.

My best thoughts and wishes to you all.

Foreword

he objective was clear: a suborbital spaceflight above 328,000 feet (100,000 meters). But this mission was far from being straightforward. SpaceShipOne was groundbreaking. And although getting off the ground wasn’t too difficult, being able to return safely to the ground with the spacecraft intact required facing some pretty tough challenges. Three test pilots, Brian Binnie, Mike Melvill, and Pete Siebold, each flew SpaceShipOne during flight testing and handled the curves, and sometimes spirals, thrown their way. “Well, it is kind of a scary little thing to fly,” said Mike Melvill of the spacecraft he piloted for the first six flights and four subsequent others.

Figure 3.1 shows SpaceShipOne and White Knight waiting for launch in the early morning sunlight.

A carefully designed vehicle flown by a highly skilled pilot could tame the perilous environment and extreme forces, but it wasn’t easy. SpaceShipOne flew a total of seventeen times during its pursuit of space and the Ansari X Prize: three captive-carry flights, eight glide flights, three powered fights within the atmosphere, and three suborbital spaceflights. The combined flight time for these was 4 hours, 11 minutes, and 4 seconds, while the total burn duration was S minutes and 47 seconds. The spaceflight profile flown by SpaceShipOne is shown in figure 3.2.

White Knight would lift off the runway at Mojave Airport with SpaceShipOne slung below. And as the pilot anxiously awaited separation, all he could do was

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Fig. 3.1. With SpaceShipOne’s oxidizer tank filled the day before a launch and a fully fueled CTN (case/throat/nozzle) installed, SpaceShipOne and White

Knight undergo preflight preparations while illuminated by the early morning Sun. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composites

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hang on until launch altitude. Upon separation, SpaceShipOne s rocket engine fired and boosted the pilot several times faster than the speed of sound. Since the rocket engine’s fuel was rubber, it gave a whole new meaning to burning rubber. But when the rocket engine shut down, after burning 76—84 seconds, the spacecraft was still only half the distance to apogee and had to coast the remaining way through the ever-thinning atmosphere.

On the way back down, SpaceShipOne’s feather ensured a safe reentry back into Earth’s atmosphere. When the craft was no longer falling at supersonic speeds, the feather retracted. SpaceShipOne, now a glider, descended to Mojave Airport for a horizontal landing, just like an ordinary airplane. Table 3.1 shows the mission profile for each of SpaceShipOne’s suborbital spaceflights.

For a spaceflight, the duration of the entire mission was only 1.6 hours. This was the time it took White Knight to take off, release

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Table 3.1 SpaceShipOne’s Suborbital Spaceflight Mission Profile

1. Liftoff of SpaceShipOne mated to White Knight

2. Captive-carry to launch altitude

3. SpaceShipOne separation from White Knight

4. Supersonic boost to space

5. Coast to apogee

6. Freefall from apogee

7. Supersonic reentry into the atmosphere

8. Descent with feather still up

9. Gliding descent back to runway

10. Horizontal landing

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Fig. 3.2. After White Knight lifted off with SpaceShipOne mounted below, it spiraled up to a launch altitude of about 47,000 feet (14,330 meters), where SpaceShipOne then separated, ignited its rocket engine, and boosted to an apogee above 100 kilometers (62.1 miles or 328,000 feet). SpaceShipOne reentered the atmosphere with its feather deployed, then reconfigured into a glider for landing at Mojave. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, provided courtesy of Scaled Composites

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SpaceShipOne, and then land. However, the spacecraft flew for about 24 minutes only, making it back from space and touching down even before White Knight did.

scaping from Earth will not always be astronomically expensive; contrary to the impression created by a Saturn launch, the energy needed to reach space is remarkably small.

“About eight hundred pounds of kerosene and liquid oxygen, costing some twenty-five dollars, will liberate enough energy to carry a man to the Moon. The fact that we currently burn a thousand tons per passenger indicates that there is vast room for improvement.

“This will come through the space refueling, nuclear propulsion and, most important of all, the devel­opment of reusable boosters, or ‘space ferries,’ which can be flown for hundreds of missions, like normal aircraft. We have to get away, as quickly as possible, from today’s missile-orientated philosophy of rocket launchers which are discarded after a single flight.”

When I wrote these words in July 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts were on their way to the Moon.* The Space Age was barely a dozen years old, and travelling to space required so much money and effort that only the governments of the richest countries could engage in it.

But the early years of space exploration were driven by different considerations: both national space agencies and TV networks seemed to love the massive firework displays at rocket launches. Indeed, witnessing a Saturn V take off could be a moving experience—if we overlooked the fact that it was a grandiosely wasteful way to travel anywhere (each Apollo mission cost around two hundred million in 1960s dollars).

So, even as I covered the Moon Landings for CBS television, I was already looking ahead to a time when space travel would make more economic sense. In my essay, I envisaged that the true Space Age would dawn sometime after 1985, “. . . and projects which today are barely feasible will become not only relatively easy, but economically self-supporting.”

I added: “The closing years of this century should see the beginnings of commercial space flight, which will be directed first towards giant manned satellites or space platforms orbiting within a thousand miles above the Earth’s surface.”

Well, in those heady days of Apollo, I couldn’t have anticipated all the detours and distractions of the 1970s that delayed our optimistic projections. Politics and economics have taken their toll, but looking back, I’m happy to note that I was off by only a decade or so.

Commercial space flight is now beginning to be technologically feasible and will soon become economically viable. The rise of citizen astronauts has already begun—this time, I doubt if politics can hold up progress because it is no longer so closely tied to the fluctuating interests and resources of national governments.

SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History chronicles a key milestone in the race to take private citizens and pri­vate enterprise to space. It’s the story of how a group of determined and passionate aerospace designers— and their financiers—pulled off one of the most remarkable accomplishments in our conquest of gravity.

In that process, they won the ten-million-dollar Ansari X Prize founded by my friend Dr. Peter Diamandis to galvanize private enterprise and technological innovation in space travel. The prize was modeled after the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize, offered in 1919 by hotelier Raymond Orteig, to the first pilot to fly nonstop between New York and Paris. An unknown airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh finally won this challenge in May 1927, flying a single-engine aircraft named Spirit of St. Louis. That feat won him instant fame and spawned the commercial aviation industry that changed our world beyond recognition.

And here’s an interesting coincidence. In 1987, I received the Lindbergh Award presented annually for those seeking a balance between technology and nature. The winner in 2000 was Burt Rutan, who went on to design SpaceShipOne with generous backing from Microsoft co-founder (and science fiction enthusiast) Paul Allen.

Burt and I are connected in other ways. I am intrigued to read that Burt’s boyhood imagination was sparked by watching Wernher von Braun on TV talking about the exploration of the Moon and Mars. Wernher was a good friend who took to diving on my suggestion—I told him that the best simulation of weightlessness was achieved underwater. And a few years ago I found out, from his long-time secretary, how Wernher had used my 1952 book, The Exploration of Space, to convince President Kennedy that it was possible to land men on the Moon.

While writing this, I came across Burt’s remark in Popular Mechanics (September 2007): “If we make a courageous decision like the goal and program we kicked off for Apollo in 1961, we will see our children or grandchildren in outposts on other planets.”

Fortunately, we need not rely solely on governments for expanding humanity’s presence beyond the Earth. The Ansari X Prize has succeeded in spurring commercial astronautics, and I hope governments will not stand in the way. I am following with much interest the emergence of a new breed of “astropreneurs” who are trying out new technologies, business models—and indeed, building a whole industry—without relying on government funding.

In that sense, space travel is returning to where it started: with maverick pioneers dreaming of journeys to orbit and beyond, some carrying out rocket experiments in their own backyards. Burt and his team have been a great deal more successful than Robert Goddard ever was in his lifetime (and, thankfully, no one is ridiculing Burt the way they did with Goddard).

Yet, today’s astropreneurs like Paul Allen and Burt Rutan are driven by the same spirit of enquiry, adventure, and exploration that sustained Lindbergh and Goddard. This, then, is the inside story of how citizens reclaimed space.

SpaceShipOne, with its landing gear retracted, was rolled on a dolly underneath White Knight and then raised using a hand crank. The top of SpaceShipOne attached to a two-point pylon that was mounted on the belly of White Knight. Two hooks inside the pylon, fore and aft, clamped onto SpaceShipOne, securing the vehicles together, as shown in figure 3.3. Heating ducts from White Knight to SpaceShipOne also ran through the pylon. The wings of SpaceShipOne were further secured by braces running down from White Knight. The clearance between the two was only a meager 1 foot.

The optimum time to launch from Mojave Airport was at day­break. Figure 3.4 shows a predawn preflight briefing, which reviewed the mission readiness and addressed any last-minute concerns. After White Knight, carrying SpaceShipOne, rolled out of the Scaled

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Fig. 3.3. SpaceShipOne attached to White Knight at several points. A pylon underneath White Knight housed two hooks that fit into two rings on top of SpaceShipOne. A brace between each set of wings also helped to stabilize SpaceShipOne and keep it from swaying back and forth. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by David M. Moore

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Fig. 3.4. Early in the morning before each test flight, a preflight briefing was held so that the test pilots, ground crew, and Mission Control could review the details of the flight plan and receive updates on the status of the vehicles and the weather conditions. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composites

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Fig. 3.5. White Knight and SpaceShipOne taxi to Mojave Airport’s Runway 30. Located less than eighty miles northeast of Los Angeles, Mojave Airport became the first inland spaceport and the first public spaceport licensed by the FAA. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composites

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Fig. 3.6. Inside Mission Control, the flight director, Doug Shane (seated

front row center), was the point person on the ground who communicated directly to the pilots aboard SpaceShipOne and White Knight during all phases of the mission. The Mission Control staff monitored all aspects of SpaceShipOne based on the instrument and video data transmitted by the craft. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composites

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Composites hangar and final preparations were completed, the two vehicles taxied out to the runway. Figure 3.5 shows White Knight and SpaceShipOne getting ready for takeoff. Once in the air, White Knight headed 40 miles (64 kilometers) to a release box, an area that had been designated by the FAA.

Early in the program, the target for the separation altitude was

50.0 feet (15,240 meters). However, both the characteristics of the air, more specifically the density, and the performance of White Knight, or lack thereof, favored a separation altitude closer to

47.0 feet (14,330 meters). For this first stage of the ascent, White Knight spiraled up at a rate of about 700 feet per minute (210 meters per minute). And by the time the vehicles reached 45,000 feet (13,720 meters), the vehicles were above about 85 percent of the atmosphere.

“We fly up there on White Knight, and that is a really long period of time. It is close to an hour to get up there,” Melvill said.

“I really hated the ride up there,” he continued. “No one wants to talk to you. They think you need to sit there and concentrate on what you are about to do. I really would have liked someone to distract me and have a conversation about something else, because an hour is a long time to sit there and worry about what’s going to happen.

“You start getting close to the drop zone and close to the altitude. Then you go through a pretty extensive checklist setting the airplane up. You trim it 10 degrees nose up, so that when it drops off, it holds its nose up.”

Watching for the slightest abnormality, Mission Control carefully monitored the flight data and video transmitted by SpaceShipOne during the entire flight, as figure 3.6 shows.

It was possible to rotate the entire horizontal stabilizer on each of the tail booms. Adjusting it with 10 degrees nose-up trim would help ensure that SpaceShipOne didn’t go into a dive once it detached from White Knight. This setting was also necessary to help force the nose up once the rocket engine fired, enabling SpaceShipOne to move from horizontal flight to nearly vertical flight.

Figure 3.7 shows a close-up of SpaceShipOne during the captive-carry.

The procedure for the airborne launch of the rocket-powered second stage from the carrier aircraft was pretty simple. Even before the 1920s, flying vehicles had been dropped by larger flying vehicles. And NASA extensively used motherships for dropping X-planes and even for flight testing the Space Shuttle (refer to figure 3.8 and figure 3.9, respectively).

White Knight had to remain steady with its wings level. The pilot in SpaceShipOne began the sequence by arming part of his release system. In the cockpit of White Knight, a yellow light then came on. White Knight would arm next, giving another yellow light. At that point, the release handle inside White Knight became “hot.” A crew member in the backseat pulled it to retract the hooks. White Knight shook with a big bang as the spring-loaded hooks came to a sudden stop. SpaceShipOne dropped away as White Knight surged upward.

“There is an instant feel of you climbing,” said Pete Siebold about flying White Knight during this separation. “You lost almost half your weight. You were at 1 g and it jumped up to 1.6 g’s the second you pulled the release handle.”

Siebold flew SpaceShipOne three times, but all the test pilots pulled double duty when it came to flying. During flight tests with SpaceShipOne, one of the other SpaceShipOne pilots always flew White Knight.

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Fig. 3.8. Carried to a height of

45,0 feet (13,720 meters) by a NASA B-52, the North American X-15 dropped from the wing at a speed of 500 miles per hour (800 kilometers per hour). The X-15 would typically carry out one of two missions: high-speed hypersonic (faster than Mach 5) test flights or high-altitude test flights. NASA-Dryden Flight Research Center

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Fig. 3.9. The Space Shuttle Enterprise launches from the top of a NASA 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA). During the test flight, Enterprise glided back down to Dryden Flight Research Center, so aerodynamic and control characteristics could be evaluated prior to an actual spaceflight. NASA-Dryden Flight Research Center

For safe separation from White Knight, as shown in figure 3.10, the pilot in SpaceShipOne pushed forward on the control stick. This briefly counteracted the trim setting on the horizontal stabilizer. So, instead of wanting to pitch up, SpaceShipOne dipped down to avoid re-contacting White Knight.

Gliding for about 10 seconds, SpaceShipOne grew quiet, since it was now out of earshot of White Knight’s engines. The pilot made some quick final checks with Mission Control.

“You have to get the motor started as soon as you possibly can because you are just teetering on the edge of a stall,” Melvill added. “You’ve got all
that rubber fuel at the back of the airplane.” The center of gravity for SpaceShipOne was very far back. If its nose pointed up too high, without the rocket engine going, a stall would develop that would cause the space­ship to lose aerodynamic control. A pilot could recover from this, but SpaceShipOne would have lost a good deal of altitude in the process.

hen SpaceShipOne touched down on Mojave’s Runway 30 after its third flight into space, it not only won the Ansari X Prize, but it also, in a way, completed a journey that had started on two separate paths that intertwined along the way and then finally merged together in 2004. SpaceShipOne was a small, lightweight rocketship somewhat resembling NASA’s early X-planes but with elements of Burt Rutan’s distinct flair for the unique and unconventional. Figure 1.1 shows Burt Rutan with Doug Shane, the test flight director, and the three SpaceShipOne test pilots, Pete Siebold, Brian Binnie, and Mike Melvill.

On that day test pilot Brian Binnie did more than capture the Ansari X Prize. He captured people’s imagination and reignited the space-crazy in them. Back in 1927, Charles Lindbergh, who just barely cleared telephone lines after takeoff in pursuit of the Orteig Prize, crossed the Atlantic Ocean nonstop from New York to Paris and sparked a boom in aviation like none other. These two turn­ing points forever changed the way people looked up into the sky and saw them­selves flying free as the birds or high as the stars.

Without people there would be no flying machines. It is not the mechanisms of engine, fuselage, wing, and empennage that provide transport into the air and through the clouds: it is the people whose ideas, visions, and daydreams have taken flight and soared. Without the human mind, the greatest height reached would only be as high as the highest surface that could be climbed.

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Fig. 1.1. Burt Rutan (top left), the SpaceShipOne and White Knight designer, and Doug Shane (top right), the test flight director, stand behind their test pilots, Pete Siebold, Brian Binnie, and Mike Melvill (left to right). Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photo­graph by Scaled Composites

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It is no coincidence that the breakthroughs in aviation have come from ingeniousness and inventiveness as early as Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of flying corkscrews and birdlike flight suits, or even earlier when the ancient Greeks pondered the air around them. As ideas like these were being conceptualized, more often than not, peers would view such thinking as folly, insanity, or even sacrilege.

Thankfully, there are a few whose hides are thicker than most, whose resilience is more enduring than most, and whose passion burns brighter than most. And more importantly, there are some whose persistence in moving forward, even if it takes stepping back­ward at times, is unwavering. It is not enough to be a great thinker. The genius lies in the execution. As inventor Thomas Edison is famous for saying, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

But these factors are no longer enough in this day and age. In centuries past, it may have been sufficient for just one person to cultivate a dream, from beginning to end, into fruition. But in today’s ever changing, ever more complicated society, often a wheel with only one cog will not provide the grip needed to take hold of an idea and spin it into something magical. It is only when the sprocket has gathered enough teeth that it can truly turn and move forward in a synchronicity of movement.

Burt Rutan

In 1965, Elbert L. “Burt” Rutan found himself in the backseat of an F-4 Phantom trying to figure out how to regain control as the fighter jet whirled around in circles in an unrecoverable flat spin. At the time, the Phantom was one of the U. S. Air Force’s frontline fighters. Under the right set of conditions, though, pilots could enter a flat spin where the only way out required the use of their ejection seats. A total of sixty-one aircraft had been lost because of this, and Rutan’s job was to determine a way to recover from this disastrous condition.

Fresh out of college, it was certainly a dream job for someone who had craved a challenge. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1943 and raised in Dinuba, California, southeast of Fresno, he had been flying model airplanes that he designed and built since he was a young boy.

“None of those things were kits,” Rutan said. “They were original designs.” He entered model-airplane competitions during high school while also learning to fly. His models took him to the nationals, and he brought home trophies.

“I was of course fascinated by space,” Rutan recalled. “I listened to the Alan Shepard flight on the radio as I was driving to my college to interview.”

Rutan attended California Polytechnic University, where he would receive his bachelor of science in aeronautical engineering. In 1964, he was one a very few students, the only one from his college, selected to attend the CalTech Space Technology Summer Institute. During this time the United States continued to lag behind the Soviet Union in the space race. Yuri Gagarin, aboard Vostok 1, had become the first man in space three years earlier, and it would be yet another five years until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would set foot on the Moon.

The U. S. space program was hungry for engineers during this electrified time. It seemed natural that someone like Rutan would have his sights set on Apollo manned Moon missions.

Rutan remembers his boyhood imagination being stirred by watching television programs where Wernher von Braun, who headed Germany’s V-2 program but was now leading NASA’s Saturn V rocket development, talked about the exploration of the Moon and Mars with Walt Disney.

“Von Braun was a big hero of mine because of the Disneyland television show in 1955,” Rutan said. “Those programs were enormously compelling to me as a twelve-year-old because we didn’t know much about Mars in ’55. I have a college astronomy textbook that I had gotten a long time ago. It was written in ’53. It is interesting to read because they are debating what kind of life is likely to be on Mars and would there be a chance that it would be intelligent life. So, imagine yourself back in a time period when you believed there was vegetation there because you saw the colors change in the telescopes.”

Rutan had a tough decision to make when it came time to leave college. Although the space program barreled forward, and opportunities
certainly waited for him, he was very skeptical about how and where he would fit in. “I felt I was so far behind on being able to come in and take a new idea and actually get it out there flying if I focused on spaceflight or manned spaceflight.”

He didn’t want to work on the space widget of the what-cha-ma-call – it subsystem. While this obscure part was indeed a piece of the puzzle that would have been necessary for launch, Rutan desired to really make a big impact and influence the big picture. Working for an airliner or fighter manufacturer didn’t interest him, for the same reason. “I’d be working on a bulkhead or a door.”

So, he turned in another direction. “I thought I could make a big dif­ference with general aviation, which I thought was archaic and frozen.” He felt that he’d have the opportunity to let his creativity fly, even if it wouldn’t be quite as high as if he worked for the U. S. space program. But Rutan’s competitiveness helped sway him in yet another direction.

“I couldn’t bring myself to go work on Cessnas while everyone I went to school with was on the way to the Moon. So, I made a compromise. I went into air force flight testing.”

This was by far the best decision Rutan could have ever made. Working as a civilian at Edwards Air Force Base in Mojave and spending six to ten months on an aircraft before moving to the next one, he learned what risks to take and what decisions to make when testing out new aircraft. This education, he felt, was critical for a designer.

“I’m out there evaluating the performance, flying qualities, safety, etc., of the top-of-the-line, brand-new military airplanes. I got to fly in them, measure data, and report on their performance.”

In the Phantom on that day in 1965 when it went into a flat spin, once Rutan and the test pilot were sure that the flat spin was unre­coverable, they deployed a special recovery parachute that forced the large fighter jet out of the spin. “I’ve done the only flat spin in an F-4 that did not have an ejection.” But the very next flight, with a different test engineer in the backseat, the spin recovery chute failed, and both the pilot and test engineer ejected to safety. Rutan still keeps in his office a piece of the F-4’s canopy from the wreckage that actually has his name on it. Eventually a procedure would be devised using the Phantom’s existing landing drag chute, which greatly reduced the rate of unrecoverable flat spins.

Rutan left the air force in 1972. He explains, “Now I could really exercise with my own responsibility, my own authority, my own decision on risk taking with nobody to answer to in developing the VariViggen, the VariEze, the Defiant, the Solitaire, and all these homebuilts. That path could never have accelerated at that rate if I had gone into the space program.”

Clear of White Knight, the pilot armed the rocket engine, flicked the ignition switch, put his head back against the seat, and grabbed the control stick with both hands.

“When you light that rocket motor off, everything literally starts with a bang. There is so much energy associated with that rocket motor. It is like a tsunami sweeps through the cabin and literally takes you away,” said Brian Binnie, the pilot who flew the first and last powered flights of SpaceShipOne.

“You really have nothing in your background or DNA to tell you that what is happening to you is good. You have no basis. Three or four seconds will go by, and you go, ‘Ah, I’m not dead. Therefore, it must be going as they told me it was going to go.’”

The roar from the rocket engine was extremely loud. “The noise is certainly worse right at ignition when you have little forward speed,” explained Binnie. “But as soon as you are supersonic, you are going faster then any sound that the rocket motor makes. It doesn’t really penetrate the cabin a lot. What you hear in the cabin is all the gurgling off the main oxidizer tank that’s right on the other side of the bulkhead from which you’re located. So, you hear that. There is a certain amount of wind noise over the vehicle. A good helmet with reasonable ear protection let the radio come across just fine.”

The force pinning the pilot to his seat just added to the flood of sensations. “The acceleration is fierce. It’s abrupt. It’s sudden. It’s a big slap in the back and whoosh off you go. It is a very dynamic environment, and you are very much holding on for dear life,” Binnie said.

“As it develops, your body readily adjusts to the g’s that you are experi­encing. They are not that high during boost. They are between 3 or 4.” Having been a former navy fighter pilot, Binnie had some experience with some pretty fast starts. The initial kick from a catapult off the deck of an aircraft carrier had some similarity. After 2—2.5 seconds, the acceleration from the catapult was over, but after the same amount of time, SpaceShipOne would still be going and going.

“A catapult shot takes you from 0 to about 150 miles per hour [240 kilometers per hour] in 2 to 2.5 seconds. If you continue that accel­eration rate, which is kind of what the spaceship is doing, you would then go from 150 to 300 miles per hour [480 kilometers per hour] in another 2.5 seconds or the 5-second mark. And at the 8-second mark, you’d be doing not 300 miles per hour but 600 miles per hour [970 kilometers per hour]. And by the 10-second mark, you’d be supersonic.”

The pilot held the control stick with both hands because, as SpaceShipOne moved faster and faster, the forces from the outside air pushed harder and harder against the vehicle and its controls. The pilot had to make sure the nose was coming up right away. Otherwise there was a danger of overspeeding SpaceShipOne and breaking it apart. The “never-exceed” speed was around 260 knots equivalent airspeed (KEAS). A knot is a nautical mile per hour, which is a little faster than a mile per hour. Equivalent airspeed is a measure of how fast a vehicle feels it’s going in terms of the air pres­sure pushing against it. So, this value may seem very low, but SpaceShipOne started out already operating above 85 percent of the atmosphere. The air density was very low to begin with and didn’t exert as much air pressure as if the vehicle were flying at a lower altitude where the air density was higher.

Figure 3.11 shows SpaceShipOne during the initial pull up, also called “turning the corner” or the “gamma turn.” With the feather locked down tight, it was critical for the pilot to keep the wings level during this phase.

“Because our wings are level, that turn results in pointing nose up,” Pete Siebold said. “So, if any portion of the time you roll to a

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Fig. 3.11. Once the rocket engine ignited, the test pilot immediately had to begin to pull the nose of SpaceShipOne up in a maneuver called "turning the corner." By the time the turn upward was complete, SpaceShipOne was already traveling at supersonic speeds. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, video capture provided courtesy of Discovery Channel and Vulcan Productions, Inc.

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non—wings level attitude, instead of going up, you are going to turn to a different heading and not go up. A significant amount of the energy is spent doing that initial turn.

“If there was any time spent non—wings level during this turn, you ran the risk of not making your ultimate goal of 100 kilometers [62.1 miles] at the end of the flight.”

A number of things caused the wing to wander back and forth. Asymmetries in the thrust from the rocket engine and asymmetries that resulted from supersonic shockwaves wanted to knock SpaceShipOne off course.

Melvill added, “And there are wind shears that exceed 100 miles per hour [160 kilometers per hour] going in different directions. So as you go up, it will blow you this way and then it blow you that way. You are not there for long, so you don’t get massive changes, but you are constantly correcting.”

By using an avionics system called the Tier One navigation unit (TONU), the pilot could ensure that SpaceShipOne was wings level and had the proper pitch rate, which was a measure of how fast the nose was rising. For the first 5 seconds, the pilot used the control stick and the rudder pedals to keep the wings level. “You can feel the forces start to build quite rapidly,” Binnie said. “And now your thinking is, ‘Okay, I’m going to keep fighting this thing physically until about 8 or 9 seconds, and then I’m going to transition over to controlling the vehicle with electric trims.’” To do this, the pilot took his left hand off the stick and reached for the rudder trim controller, a big black knob that looked liked a turtle shell.

Binnie explained, “As you are going through transonics, where the vehicle is shocking up asymmetrically, it is still rocking back and forth or more like whipping back and forth. Your job is to try to filter out the oscillatory motion and chase down with the turtle any longer-term disturbance that is driving the nose of the vehicle off trajectory.

“You have high-rate motions but you have a low-rate controller. So, things don’t happen as quickly as you’d like them to. You put in an

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Fig. 3.12. Traveling close to vertical, SpaceShipOne’s hybrid rocket engine burned 76-84 seconds during a spaceflight. At rocket engine shutdown, SpaceShipOne was a little more than half the way up to apogee. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composites

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adjustment, and you’re going to have to be patient to sort of see it take effect. And that is not the easiest thing in the world to do because you just had your brains scrambled. And everything about you is on high alert, and now you have to be patient and wait for the thing to respond. If you don’t, it is easy to over-control it, and you can get yourself into even more trouble.”

As the pilot was finishing the initial pull up, SpaceShipOne passed the rough transonic transition from subsonic to supersonic.

“You settle in around the 10- to 15-second mark and look out the window. And appreciate that you are no longer horizontal. The nose will appear vertical, but it is not quite there yet,” Binnie said.

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Fig. 3.13. Photographed from inside the cockpit of SpaceShipOne by Brian Binnie near the apogee of 367,500 feet (112,000 meters), the Channel Islands and the Pacific Coast peek through the cloud cover as black sky shrouds Earth. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composites

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Figure 3.12 shows SpaceShipOne and its contrail during the ascent to space.

As SpaceShipOne continued to ascend and slowly move its nose closer to vertical, the use of the control stick came back. The pilot could again use the mechanical controls to fly, even though it traveled much faster than Mach 1 and was still gaining speed. The air density was too low to create much opposing force but still high enough for aerodynamics to work.

At about the 1-minute mark, the rocket engine went through a liquid-to-gas transition. “This is kind of a wake-up call that you are getting near the end of the boost phase of flight,” Binnie said. “The vehicle shakes and shudders some more. And then the rocket motor valve that you are sitting not too far from has some unusual acoustics
associated with it. It sounds like riding along with a possessed cat. It kind of screeches and howls and complains.”

SpaceShipOne reached a maximum speed of Mach 3.09, or 2,186 miles per hour (3,518 kilometers per hour).This occurred just before burnout while it was still accelerating. But the atmosphere was very thin at this point, so the airspeed was only about 40 knots equivalent airspeed.

The highest altitude for rocket-engine shutdown occurred at

213,0 feet (64,920 meters). The burn lasted 84 seconds. Unlike shutdown inside the thick atmosphere, where thrust no longer kept the pilot pinned to the seat and the deceleration force flung him forward in his seat, shutdown at high altitudes was tame because of the thin atmosphere and because the rocket engine’s thrust had tapered off due to the longer burn duration. SpaceShipOne now coasted upward.

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Fig. 3.14. During the 3.5 minutes of weightlessness, the test pilots were able to take photographs from inside SpaceShipOne’s cockpit. In this photograph, the red-colored thermal protection on the leading edge of the right wing can be seen through one of the porthole windows. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composites

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“Three wonderful things happen/’recalled Binnie. “The noise goes away. The shaking, the shuddering, the vibration go away, and you become instantly weightless. And the weightlessness is just a pro­foundly exciting and pleasurable experience.”

“Then of course there is that view. You’ve seen it on the cover of magazines and things like that. But when you see it for yourself, it is really breathtaking. The eye is so much more dynamic than a video or a camera. It is yours for the enjoyment.”

As SpaceShipOne rocketed upward, light scattered less and less in the dwindling atmosphere. “You can already see the blue skies turning a much darker, deeper shade of blue and as you continue to watch that, it will deepen and darken and kind of go purplish and then to black,” said Binnie.

Figure 3.13 shows the black sky surrounding Earth in a photo­graph taken by Brian Binnie aboard SpaceShipOne. So where are the stars in the black sky? Above the atmosphere there should be stars galore. Well, they are there. However, a camera cannot catch the stars. Earth is much too bright. To see the stars in a photograph, a much longer exposure time is needed, but then the features of Earth would be totally washed out. This phenomenon can also be observed in the famous “Earthrise” photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 8 as they circled the Moon, where Earth is seen rising above the sur­face of the Moon and no stars can be seen in the background.

Following a ballistic arc, the unpowered spacecraft continued to climb, coasting up while the atmosphere dwindled away. To win the Ansari X Prize, it was necessary to reach an altitude of 328,000 feet (100,000 meters). So, as SpaceShipOne raced toward this height, the pilot enjoyed the effects of zero-g. Without the atmosphere, the drag
caused by the air resistance was no longer a factor causing SpaceShipOne to decelerate. Gravity still had a hold on SpaceShipOne, however, and the spacecraft was not traveling at a high enough veloc­ity to escape the pull of Earth.

Having taken an hour to reach launch altitude and separation, the max­imum altitude when SpaceShipOne reached the top of its climb, or its apogee, occurred about 3 minutes after the rocket engine initially fired off. SpaceShipOne stopped moving up at this point and began to free fall back to Earth. The pilot experienced weightless conditions for approxi­mately 3.5 minutes, which he started to feel once the rocket engine shut down. For comparison, the Space Shuttle took 8.5 minutes to go from its launch pad to its orbital altitude of around 200 miles (320 kilometers).

Shot from space, the photograph in figure 3.14 gives a glimpse from SpaceShipOne’s window of the leading edge of its wing high above desert mountains.

While outside the atmosphere, SpaceShipOne could not use its rudders or elevons to control movement whether it was ascending or descending. Since space is a vacuum, there was no air to provide the lift that these control surfaces required to change the spacecraft’s course. This is the same problem faced by the Space Shuttle, as well as other spacecraft and satellites. Even astronauts during extravehicular activity (EVA), floating outside the International Space Station, need a way to steer themselves around. To maneuver in space, they accomplished this by shooting little jets of gas in a direction opposite to that of the intended motion. So, for example, if a spacecraft needed to move to the right, it shot a puff of gas to the left.

SpaceShipOne was no different. In the airless environment, the pilot had to use the reaction control system (RCS) to maneuver SpaceShipOne.

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Fig. 3.15. In an interview with Ed Bradley for 60 Minutes after the Ansari X Prize spaceflights, Burt Rutan shows the feather configuration and describes how it allowed the safe return of SpaceShipOne to Earth’s atmosphere. Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photograph by Scaled Composites

After he switched the RCS on, he used the control stick and rudder pedals to control thrusters mounted on the fuselage and wings.

“We chose to put a microswitch on the end of the travel, so you had to get your knees out of the way just to do anything at all. You had to move the stick all the way to a stop until it closed the microswitch, opened up a valve, and then the jet worked,” Melvill said.

The rudder petals worked the same way, in that they had to be pushed all the way on the floor to activate the thrusters. So, the thrusters would fire as long as the pilot pressed against the microswitches.