On the ground, Binnie called it a "fantastic experience."

"The best part is when the motor shut down," said the former U.S. Navy pilot, who also is a business manager at Rutan's company, Scaled Composites. "It's very, very quiet, you're instantly weightless, the Earth is below you and the dark sky above. It's a thrilling view."

The $10 million Ansari X prize, created to encourage private spaceflights, was offered to the team that sent a ship capable of carrying three people into space twice in two weeks. SpaceShipOne carried weights equivalent to two people along with its pilot.

The prize, sponsored by a family of Dallas telecom entrepreneurs, will be split between SpaceShipOne's financier, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, and Rutan's Scaled Composites.

As for SpaceShipOne, Rutan said it may eventually find its way into the Smithsonian Institution, but it will probably be used for more research first.

Monday's flight came on the 47th anniversary of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, the world's first man-made satellite, which started the first international space race.

But Marion Blakey, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, compared Monday's flight to another historic one — that of the Wright Brothers. "This was an incredibly historic day," she said.

Blakey said the FAA is only starting to consider regulatory rules for commercial space travel but added she had no qualms about the safety of SpaceShipOne.

"We saw, I think, an unparalleled performance in terms of safety," she said.

Just as impressive as SpaceShipOne's altitude records is how quickly it reached them — and how.

NASA can take years to make a single launch, spending hundreds of millions of dollars and employing hundreds of engineers.

Rutan's group accomplished its goal with about $25 million in funding from Allen and a core staff of about 20 people. The guts of SpaceShipOne's "Mission Control" was a group of desktop computers linked together. And while many NASA spacecraft can be used only once, about 97 percent of SpaceShipOne is reusable.