SpaceShipOne
Scaled Composites, designed by Burt Rutan (Burt Rutan born 1943) · 2004
A white and blue craft with a row of round portholes down each side of the nose and a strange tail that looks as if it has been folded upward hangs between the Spirit of St. Louis and the Bell X-1. It is SpaceShipOne, the first privately built and privately funded vehicle to carry a person into space. On the twenty first of June 2004 the test pilot Mike Melvill flew it above one hundred kilometres over the Mojave desert, and that autumn, on two flights within five days, it won the ten million dollar Ansari X Prize for repeated private spaceflight.
Burt Rutan, the designer, had built unusual aircraft for decades, including the Voyager that flew around the world without refuelling. His solution to the problem of coming back from space was the feathered tail: the whole rear half of the wings and tail booms rotate upward, so that the craft falls like a shuttlecock, stable and slow, without any need for the pilot to steer. Look at the hinge line on the wings and at the round windows, which were cheaper and stronger than a fighter's canopy. The motor at the back burned rubber with laughing gas, a hybrid rocket that could be switched off. The craft was carried to fifteen thousand metres by a mother ship called White Knight before dropping and firing.
The project cost about twenty five million dollars, paid by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, and the design became the basis of Virgin Galactic's passenger spacecraft. Rutan gave SpaceShipOne to the Smithsonian in 2005, and it hangs in the Milestones hall in the company of the aircraft that inspired it. Its three flights to space are its whole career; like the Wright Flyer and the X-1, it was retired the moment it had proved its point.
Did You Know? SpaceShipOne's rocket motor burned rubber and nitrous oxide, laughing gas, a combination chosen because it was cheap and safe to store.
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