Space Ride Garners Designer $10 Million Prize
Posted on: Wednesday, 6 October 2004, 06:00 CDT
Oct. 5--Pilot Brian Binnie celebrates completion of suborbital flight, which won aircraft designer Burt Rutan $10 million prize yesterday.
Spacecraft designer Burt Rutan claimed the $10 million X Prize yesterday after his stubby spaceship successfully soared into space for the second time in a week.
Unlike the previous trip, this time it was smooth sailing for SpaceShipOne as it blasted 62 miles through the atmosphere.
"Let me say I thank God that I live in a country where this is possible," pilot Brian Binnie said after landing in the Mojave Desert and hugging his wife.
Rocket man Michael Melvill piloted the previous SpaceShipOne flight, a wild ride that corkscrewed through the cosmos after the daredevil pilot apparently gave the ship a bit too much gas.
With Binnie at the controls, there were no such unplanned dramatics as he fired SpaceShipOne's rockets, broke free of the carrier plane at 46,000 feet and screamed into space at three times the speed of sound.
Ninety minutes after taking off, SpaceShipOne was back on the ground and Rutan was breaking out the champagne as the mother ship and chase planes made flyovers for delighted fans on the ground.
Federal Aviation Administration chief Marion Blakey, who watched history being made from the runway, said,"It feels a little bit like Kitty Hawk must have," referring to the site of the Wright Brothers' historic first airplane flight.
NASA's Mission Control relayed word of the SpaceShipOne flight to the international space station, where astronaut Mike Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka cheered.
"Fantastic," Fincke said, adding that he and Padalka were happy to learn that they weren't "the only ones off the planet."
The Ansari X Prize was created to encourage space tourism and was to be awarded to the first privately built, manned rocket ship to fly in space twice within two weeks.
The SpaceShipOne program has been funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who is also partnering with Virgin Atlantic honcho Richard Branson to begin regular airline service to the edge of space starting in 2007.
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