After a day spent reviewing its spectacular but wild spaceflight Wednesday, aerospace visionary Burt Rutan's team is sticking to its plan to try to capture the Ansari X Prize with a second launch on Monday.
X Prize media representative Ian Murphy said Rutan notified competition officials late Thursday afternoon that his American Mojave Aerospace squad will send its SpaceShipOne aloft as planned to take the $10 million jackpot.
Rutan picked the date, Oct. 4, because it's the anniversary of the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik I, the flight that marked the dawn of the space age. Under the X Prize rules, the American Mojave team has until 8:34 a.m. and 4 seconds PDT on Oct. 13 to complete its second flight. That's precisely two weeks after SpaceShipOne landed Wednesday.
Radar data from nearby Edwards Air Force Base showed the three-person spaceplane, carrying pilot Mike Melvill and ballast in place of two passengers for a required payload of 270 kilograms (594 pounds), flew to an altitude of 337,500 feet. That's about 103 kilometers (roughly 64 miles), comfortably above the prize altitude of 100 kilometers (62.5 miles).
Immediately after Wednesday's flight, Rutan reported SpaceShipOne had "no squawks" – no apparent mechanical or structural problems – and was ready to fly again.
But he held off on making an immediate announcement of the second flight so his team could look into the cause of the rapid roll the ship went into as it soared toward space Wednesday.
The roll's cause hasn't been publicly explained, though both Rutan and mission pilot Mike Melvill speculated on the cause during a postflight press conference. Both referred to problems Melvill experienced during a June 21 flight when SpaceShipOne became the first privately financed vehicle to go into space and Melvill became the first people's astronaut.
The June flight began with the plane rolling 90 degrees to the left, then 90 degrees to the right, before Melvill gained control. The craft was affected by severe wind shear – an abrupt change in wind speed and direction. Rutan said the ship was affected by what he called "a known deficiency in its flying qualities."
"It has too much dihedral effect," he said. That refers to the tendency of an aircraft with wings tilted up or down from the horizontal to roll when they encounter winds from the side. Normally, Rutan said, "a plane that has not much dihedral effect, it just tends to straighten. But an airplane that has too much, it rolls." He said SpaceShipOne tends to roll "much too much" when encountering side winds.
Melvill acknowledged that the June problems were partly due to how he handled the plane and suggested he may have inadvertently triggered Wednesday's roll problem, too.
"I didn't think it was me last time, but boy, when we looked at the data, there it was, big as life," Melvill said. "So I'm inclined to believe it was something I did."
Both Melvill and Rutan stressed that the flight's trajectory remained stable during the rolls and that Melvill easily maintained control of the craft.
The X Prize was created in 1996 by engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis to encourage development of craft for thrill rides into suborbital space. Rutan's team is the only one of more than two dozen from six countries that has attempted a prize flight.
The success of Rutan's team, with financial backing from billionaire Paul Allen, appears to have brought Diamandis' dream of space tourism closer to reality. Earlier this week, Richard Branson, the British airline, entertainment and telecom magnate, announced a suborbital tourism venture.
The new effort, called Virgin Galactic, will license technology from Rutan and Allen to build a fleet of five spaceliners that Branson hopes will go into service in 2007. The projected ticket price for a three-day orientation and training camp and a quick blast just past the edge of space: about $208,000.
