Brian’s Out of This World As Space Team Wins Pounds 5.6m

An ungainly looking private spaceship blasted through the Earth’s atmosphere for a second time in a week yesterday to capture a pounds 5.6 million prize meant to encourage tourists to get out of this world.

A crowd of thousands of enthusiasts on the ground in California’s Mojave desert began celebrating as soon as SpaceShipOne appeared to have climbed just over 62 miles – generally considered to be the point where the Earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins.

The rocket plane, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, took off from a desert runway slung to the belly of a carrier plane with test pilot Brian Binnie at the wheel.

It was released at about 46,000 feet and fired its rockets to continue to the edge of space. ‘This is the true frontier of transportation,’ said Marion Blakey, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, who stood near the runway to watch the space flight.

About an hour after it landed, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis announced that SpaceShipOne’s team had claimed the prize, awarded for the first privately built, manned rocket ship to fly in space twice in a span of two weeks.

The choice of Brian Binnie as Monday’s pilot was kept secret until hours before the take-off. Last week, SpaceShipOne rolled dozens of times with Michael Melvill at the wheel as it hurtled toward space at three times the speed of sound.

‘Let me say I thank God that I live in a country where this is possible,’ Binnie said after landing and receiving a hug of congratulations from his wife. ‘And I really mean that. There’s no place on Earth that you can take this flag and take it up to space.’

After a safety analysis, SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan posted preliminary information about last week’s flight on his web site this weekend to address what he called the ‘incorrect rumours’ that have circulated.

The first roll occurred at a high speed, about Mach 2.7, but aerodynamic loads on the spacecraft were low and decreasing rapidly ‘so the ship never saw any significant structural stresses,’ he said.

Diamandis came up with the X Prize, hoping it would have the same effect on space travel as the Orteig Prize had on air travel. Charles Lindbergh claimed that $25,000 prize in 1927 after making his solo transatlantic flight.

Major funding came from the Ansari family of Dallas. More than two dozen teams around the world are trying to win the prize, but only SpaceShipOne has reached space.

Last week, Sir Richard Branson, the British airline mogul and adventurer, announced that beginning in 2007, he will begin offering paying customers flights into space aboard rockets like the SpaceShipOne.

He plans to call the service Virgin Galactic.