Left Gear "Retracts" On Landing: Damage Minor

On the day the world celebrated the centennial of flight, Burt Rutan and company were themselves high in the air over the California desert, testing a vehicle for the next century of aviation. It was a significant milestone for Scaled Composites in its bid for the $10 million X PRIZE: The first manned supersonic flight by an aircraft developed by a small company's private, non-government effort.

Spaceshipone is Scaled's entry in the private space race -- the bid to become the first non-governmental manned flight into the nether reaches.

In 1947, fifty-six years ago, history's first supersonic flight was flown by Chuck Yeager in the Bell X-1 rocket under a US Government research program. Since then, a lot of supersonic aircraft have been developed for research, military and, in the case of the recently retired Concorde, commercial applications. All these efforts were developed by large aerospace prime companies, using extensive government resources.

But Scaled's Wednesday morning mission demonstrated that supersonic flight is now the domain of a small company doing privately-funded research, without government help. The flight also represents an important milestone in efforts to demonstrate that truly low-cost space access is feasible.

The White Knight turbojet launch aircraft, flown by test pilot Peter Siebold, carried research rocket plane SpaceShipOne to 48,000 feet near the desert town of California City (CA). At 8:15 a.m. PDT, White Knight Flight engineer Cory Bird pulled a handle to release SpaceShipOne. The spaceship's test pilot, Brian Binnie then flew it to a stable 0.55 Mach gliding flight condition, started a pull-up, and fired its hybrid rocket motor.

Nine seconds later, SpaceShipOne broke the sound barrier and continued its steep powered ascent. The climb was very aggressive, accelerating forward at more than three times normal gravity while pulling upward at more than 2.5 g's. When the motor shutdown, 15 seconds after ignition, SpaceShipOne was climbing at a 60-degree angle and flying near 1.2 Mach (930 mph). Brian then continued the maneuver to a vertical climb, achieving zero speed at an altitude of 68,000 feet. He then configured the ship in its high-drag "feathered" shape to simulate the condition it will experience when it enters the atmosphere after a space flight.

Not Without Glitches

At apogee, SpaceShipOne was in near-weightless conditions, emulating the characteristics it will later encounter during the planned space flights in which it will be at zero-g for more than three minutes. After descending in feathered flight for about a minute, Brian reconfigured the ship to its conventional glider shape and flew a 12-minute glide to landing at Scaled's home airport of Mojave (CA). The landing was not without incident as the left landing gear retracted at touchdown causing the ship to veer to the left and leave the runway with its left wing down. Scaled reports damage from the landing incident was minor and can easily be repaired. There were no injuries.

The milestone of private supersonic flight was not an easy task. It involved the development of a new propulsion system, the first rocket motor developed for manned space flights in several decades. The new hybrid motor was developed in-house at Scaled with first firings in November 2002. The motor uses an ablative nozzle supplied by AAE and operating components supplied by SpaceDev. FunTech teamed with Scaled to develop a new Inertial Navigation flight director. The first flight of the White Knight launch aircraft was in August 2002 and SpaceShipOne began its glide tests in August 2003.

FMI: www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/index.htm