SpaceShipOne
SpaceShipOne, the brainchild of Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites (funded by the co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allan), was the winner of the Ansari XPrize. The prize needed to be won by a private company and/or person who designed and built a manned spacecraft that could make two trips to space and back within a time span of two weeks. The $10 million prize was won by the Tear One project on October 4th, 2004 with their experimental SpaceShipOne craft. The craft was raised to an altitude of 50,000 ft by the White Knight. The spacecraft then disengaged from the White Knight and engaged it's thrusters to propel itself outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. The spacecraft descended by tilting it's wings at an angle to the body and using them as well as the body to create a large amount of controllable drag. The “feather fall” technique prevented the spacecraft from burning up on re-entry and slowed it down to a manageable speed. After the twenty-two minute descent from space the craft landed like a normal airplane.
SpaceShipOne made its first sub-orbital manned flight on June 21st, 2004 under the control of Mike Melvil. The vehicle repeated its feat on September 29th, 2004 under the same pilot and was flown by Brian Binnie on October 4th (exactly 47 years after Sputnik’s launch) to win the XPrize.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne
http://www.xprize.org/teams/mojave_aerospace_ventures.php
http://www.aerospaceguide.net/spaceplanes/spaceshipone.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize
