Spaceship launch starts prize quest

A team of entrepreneurs will try to blast a rocket plane into space Wednesday in the first of two flights required to win the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award aiming to boost commercial space travel.

SpaceShipOne, the creation of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan, will be lifted off an airstrip in Mojave, Calif., at 6 a.m. PT with the help of a carrier plane. The vehicle, capable of traveling three times the speed of sound, will then fire its rocket and head toward zero gravity — about 62 miles above the Earth.

"We're all very confident," Rutan said Tuesday, quickly adding, "Anything can happen, though. . . . The fact that this has gone so well — I pinch myself. I wouldn't have believed we'd be here today."

X Prize rules say that a team must send an occupied, reusable craft into space twice in two weeks. SpaceShipOne is scheduled for another flight on Monday, five days after the first launch. Rutan declined to disclose the pilot's name.

A nonprofit group called the X Prize Foundation is offering the $10 million prize to encourage the development of a commercial space industry. The prize has gone unclaimed for eight years, but SpaceShipOne is considered the most serious contender yet.

Humans have been traveling to space for 43 years, but nearly everyone who has gone into space has been a professional astronaut. The few people who have flown to space as tourists all paid huge sums to ride on ships operated by the Russian government.

SpaceShipOne, a guppy-shaped vehicle with portholes, made history with a test flight in June. The craft, piloted by 63-year-old Mike Melvill, became the first to reach space without government support when it successfully passed into zero gravity.

That trip was a practice run and was not intended to win the X Prize. It carried only Melvill, whereas the flight tomorrow must carry the weight of three people on board. Flight organizers said they will meet that weight requirement by having a pilot and enough ballast on board to approximate the weight of two others.

SpaceShipOne's mission is unique and possibly dangerous. The craft suffered some unexpected problems with its control systems and wind shears during its flight on June 21, forcing Melvill to use a backup system. Those problems have since been solved, according to the group.

At 28 feet long, SpaceShipOne is less than a quarter of the length of the space shuttle. It cost roughly $20 million to build. A single shuttle flight costs $500 million.

Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin Atlantic Airways, said Monday that he's forming a company to take paying passengers to space as early as 2007. Branson estimates a ride will require several days of training and an outlay of $190,000.

SpaceShipOne itself will probably never carry tourists. But it's a good bet to win the X Prize. None of the other groups vying for the prize has launched a manned test flight yet. Rutan and Allen's closest competitor is a Canada-based team called the daVinci Project. It had planned to launch its X prize-qualifying flight Saturday but announced last week that equipment problems have forced a delay.