On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne Rockets Into History and Claims the $10 Million Ansari X Prize
On October 4, 2004, a stubby white spacecraft called SpaceShipOne roared off the Mojave Desert floor and climbed past the edge of space for the second time in five days, sealing the first privately funded human spaceflight program's claim to the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
The Mojave Gambit
Piloted by Brian Binnie, SpaceShipOne launched from beneath its carrier aircraft, White Knight, before igniting its hybrid rocket motor and screaming past the 100-kilometer Kármán line that internationally defines the boundary of space. The flight capped a challenge first announced in 1996 by the X Prize Foundation, which promised its purse to the first non-government team to fly a reusable crewed spacecraft to space twice within two weeks. Funded largely by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and designed by aviation maverick Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, SpaceShipOne had already made its qualifying flight on September 29, piloted by Mike Melvill. Binnie's follow-up flight pushed the craft to roughly 368,000 feet, a record altitude for a winged, reusable vehicle. Skeptics had spent years dismissing commercial spaceflight as a rich man's fantasy, a notion that dissolved somewhere over the Mojave's dry lakebeds.
The victory reverberated far beyond the prize money, which barely covered the estimated $25 million Allen had poured into the project. Richard Branson, watching closely, soon licensed the underlying technology to launch Virgin Galactic, betting that ordinary paying passengers might one day follow Binnie's path. NASA officials took notice too, as the flight arrived amid growing pressure to open low-Earth orbit and suborbital travel to commercial players rather than keeping it a exclusively government enterprise. SpaceShipOne itself never flew again, retiring to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, hung beside the Spirit of St. Louis and Apollo 11's command module—odd company for a machine built in a Mojave hangar on a billionaire's bet.
