Ignoring a warning to abort the flight, a test pilot took a stubby-looking rocket plane on a cork-screwing, white-knuckle ride past the edge of the atmosphere on Wednesday, completing the first stage of a quest to win a US$10 million prize.
As spectators and controllers nervously watched from the ground, SpaceShipOne rolled dozens of times as it hurtled toward space at nearly three times the speed of sound. It reached an altitude of 103km over the Mojave Desert.
Spaceship designer Burt Rutan said he asked pilot Michael Melvill to shut down the engine, but Melvill kept going until he reached the altitude specified under the rules for the Ansari X Prize, a bounty offered to the first privately built, manned rocket ship to fly in space twice in a span of two weeks.
"I did a victory roll at the top," the 62-year-old Melvill joked from atop the spaceship after it glided safely to a landing.
The problem was being analyzed by the spacecraft's builders, who must decide whether to proceed with another flight on Monday in order to win the X Prize.
But Rutan and Melvill were confident the flight would go on as planned. Rutan said rolling occurred during flight simulations, and it was not a complete surprise when it happened on Wednesday.
"I've looked at it, and I think we just change out the engine and fill it with gas and let it go," Melvill said.
The test pilot said he may have caused the rolling himself.
"You know, you're extremely busy at that point," he said. "Your feet and your hands and your eyes and everything is working about as fast as you can work them, and probably I stepped on something too quickly and caused the roll."
SpaceShipOne, with Melvill at the controls, made history in June when it became the first private, manned craft to reach space.
The Ansari X Prize will go to the first craft to safely complete two flights to an altitude of 100km -- generally considered to be the point where the Earth's atmosphere ends and space begins -- in a 14-day span.
The St. Louis-based X Prize Foundation is offering the bounty in hopes of inspiring an era of space tourism in which spaceflight is not just the domain of government agencies such as NASA.
Rutan, with more than US$20 million from Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, secretly developed Space-ShipOne -- which has a wing span of just 5m -- and is well ahead of two dozen teams building X Prize contenders around the world.
During its 81-minute flight, Space-ShipOne climbed to 102,870m -- almost 3km above its target, said Gregg Maryniak, executive director of the X Prize Foundation.
Rutan said controllers asked Melvill to shut the engine down early because of the rolling, but Melvill kept going until he was certain he would reach the target altitude.
Melvill said he did shut down the engine 11 seconds earlier than planned after determining the craft would reach its target.
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