During 18 months in 2003 and 2004, SpaceShipOne, Scaled Composites’ original air-launched spaceplane, made 14 free flights of which six were powered, the rest glides. Although SS1 was a novel design with an untried type of motor and was venturing into inhospitable territory last visited by the X-15 almost 50 years earlier, the privately funded program progressed with speed and smoothness that were a credit to Burt Rutan himself and to the talents of the team of engineers and pilots he had assembled.
Although a few potentially life-threatening problems arose, the program ended without mishap and gained the $10 million Ansari XPrize, for which it was, in fact, the only realistic competitor. The reported program cost, met by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was $25 million.
