Private space ship lands safely after wild ride

1.00pm - By GINA KEATING and MICHAEL BELFIORE

MOJAVE, California - SpaceShipOne landed safely in the California desert today after a wild corkscrew-like ascent into space, and is now a step closer to a $15 million prize intended to boost commercial space travel.

The stubby, short-winged craft took off from the Mojave airport shortly after dawn attached to its carrier ship, the White Knight, and then separated and blasted off toward space about an hour later.

But just after firing its rocket, SpaceShipOne began rolling wildly, the white craft corkscrewing and trailing smoke against a blue sky. Alarmed flight planners asked the 63-year-old pilot, Michael Melvill, to abandon the attempt to qualify for the Ansari X Prize.

"We had a roll we didn't expect late in the game. We asked him to abort. But he hung in for a handful of seconds to make sure we had the X Prize," said aircraft designer Burt Rutan.

The South African-born Melvill said the harrowing barrel-roll that began as SpaceShipOne punched out of the atmosphere into the blackness of space appeared to be triggered by a piloting error he made rather than a problem with the craft itself.

Melvill said he shut down the rocket engine 11 seconds early but only after he was sure the blunt-nosed spaceship was on track to hit its target altitude of over 62 miles (100km).

"When I got to the top, I straightened it up and took a few pictures with a still camera out of the window. The black sky, the horizon and the ground. It was spectacular. You really can't describe what it looked like," Melvill told reporters after stepping out of the minivan-sized space plane.

After peaking beyond the atmosphere, SpaceShipeOne boomed back toward the California desert at Mach 3 before entering a long, slow spiral glide toward landing accompanied by three chase planes.

The team behind SpaceShipOne, which was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was expected to announce later on Wednesday whether the flight formally qualified as the first of two space sorties needed to qualify for the Ansari X Prize.

The US$10 million prize ($15.13 million), which has been offered by a group of private donors, will go to the first team to build a spacecraft without government help, launch three people or their weight equivalent into space and then repeat the feat with the same craft within two weeks.

Rutan, who created Voyager, the plane that completed the first non-stop, non-refuelled flight around the world in 1986, said he expected that SpaceShipOne would be ready to launch again Monday from Mojave.

Melvill said he would not pilot the craft next week. "I'm too old for this sort of thing," he quipped.

On June 21, with Melvill at the controls, SpaceShipOne, became the first privately funded, manned craft to reach space.

British entrepeneur and adventurer Richard Branson said in London this week that his Virgin Group planned to offer passenger space flights aboard rockets based on SpaceShipOne by 2007.

X Prize founder Peter Diamandis said he was inspired by the $IS25,000 Orteig Prize won by American aviator Charles Lindbergh after his 1927 transatlantic flight.

Lindbergh's flight helped to demonstrate that air travel could be safe and affordable for ordinary people and blazed the trail for commercial airlines -- a feat SpaceShipOne seems poised to repeat for space travel.

- REUTERS