BURT RUTAN CHOSE the day carefully—December 17, 2003, the hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight—to send a signal about the importance of what he planned to accomplish. The same day that Elon Musk was parading his Falcon 1 rocket down Independence Avenue in Washington, DC, Rutan was getting ready for the first powered flight of the spaceplane he had been building in secret.
He had a cadre of three test pilots working for him to choose from. All with different backgrounds and experiences. All eager to fly. All fiercely competitive in what had become an extraordinary race to become the first commercial mission to reach space.
There was Brian Binnie, the former navy fighter pilot who had experience conducting combat missions over Iraq during the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s and held degrees from two Ivy League universities. He had a runner’s trim build and a calm, soft-spoken nature that endured even when things got hairy in the sky.
Mike Melvill was in many ways Binnie’s opposite. At sixty-three, he was eyeing retirement. A native of South Africa, he had dropped out of high school and had largely taught himself how to fly. But he was one of Rutan’s very first employees. They had known each other for decades. Melvill was a natural in the air. The man’s instincts in the cockpit were so incredible that Rutan trusted him completely.
Then there was Peter Siebold, the young Generation Xer, who had a round, innocent face that made him look a little like an adult version of Beaver Cleaver, the chipmunk-toothed boy who starred in the 1950s-era sitcom. But he was ambitious and supersmart, and combined his aerospace experience with his engineering background to develop the simulator they were using for Rutan’s latest invention, a spaceplane called SpaceShipOne.
“You could not get any more different,” Rutan recalled years later. “I wanted all three of these guys to be astronauts.”
The curious-looking vehicle was Rutan’s entrant in the contest known as the Ansari X Prize, which was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh won for his epic, across-the-Atlantic flight in 1927. Instead of crossing an ocean, the finish line of the X Prize would be reaching an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles), the barrier considered the edge of space.
The winner of the $10 million contest would have to fly a manned spacecraft to that height, land it safely, and then do it again within two weeks. Another rule was that the spacecraft had to be built with private funds—not government money.
The organizers of the X Prize hoped that just as Lindbergh’s flight had touched off a revolution in commercial aviation, their contest would spark a new commercial space movement, one that finally would end the government’s monopoly on space.
Rutan’s spaceship design was, of course, unconventional. All of his planes were. A blunt eccentric with Elvis-like sideburns, Rutan had founded his curious little company, Scaled Composites, in 1982 in Mojave, where his experimental designs often had multiple wings, which sometimes went out and then curved up, making a U shape. Sometimes they had not one fuselage, but three. It was as if his inspiration came not just from the laws of aerodynamics but from Picasso. Rutan had assembled a team of some of the most innovative airplane engineers, who were designing, testing, and then flying the planes they had built, usually within a year.
Instead of launching vertically from a launchpad, SpaceShipOne would be tethered to the belly of a mothership that would fly to nearly 50,000 feet. Once aloft, the mothership, known as WhiteKnightOne, would drop the spacecraft, which would send it plummeting like a baby bird taking what appears to be a suicide dive from its mother’s nest. The free fall would last just a few seconds, until the pilot ignited the engines and the spacecraft took off.
The concept, known as air launch, had been around for years, a technique used mostly by the military. Perhaps most famously, Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1 was air launched from a Boeing B-29 before he became the first person to break the sound barrier in 1947 over the same Mojave Desert where SpaceShipOne would fly.
But unlike other air-launched vehicles, Rutan had a special design for SpaceShipOne, an idea that had come to him in the middle of the night. Essentially, the spaceplane’s wings would be able to detach from the body of the plane and fold upward in what he called a “feather” maneuver. The upright wings would act like the feathers of a badminton shuttlecock, centering the plane by creating drag for a reentry into Earth’s atmosphere so soft that it eliminated the need for a heat shield. Once SpaceShipOne was safely back in the dense air of the atmosphere, the wings would fold back down, and the aircraft would glide back to the ground.
It was a brilliant, revolutionary design that could make the fall back to Earth safer. But if the feather was unlocked at the wrong time, when the spaceplane was screaming upward, for example, it could have devastating consequences.
RUTAN HAD FACED a difficult decision in picking the pilot for the first powered flight. Up to now, the pilots had been flying SpaceShipOne like a glider, floating back to the ground. But on this flight, the plan was to not only light the engine for the first time, but break the sound barrier in what would be one of the most significant tests of Rutan’s vehicle.
Rutan was like a baseball manager deciding who should pitch on opening day. Melvill was a trusted friend and accomplished pilot. Siebold had the smarts. But after weighing his options, Rutan went with Binnie. How could you go wrong with a war veteran, who had landed his F/A-18 Hornet on aircraft carriers?
The day of the flight was a beautiful morning in Mojave. The air was still and crisp. If Binnie was nervous, he didn’t show it, even though he knew that this was an audition of sorts. If he flew well, then perhaps he’d get the chance to become the first commercial pilot to fly to space.
Binnie, trim and tall in his flight suit, looked as if he was ready for Top Gun. As he climbed aboard the spaceplane, he sat patiently while WhiteKnightOne escorted him to altitude. Then, when it was time, he calmly told mission control, “Go for release.”
After SpaceShipOne dropped, he lit the ignition and was off. The motor blast pinned him back into his seat, and the engine burned for just fifteen white-knuckled seconds. Still, it was “quite the insult to your senses,” he said. “It’s a cascade of noise and vibrations. The ship almost immediately complains. You open the gate and you’re on this bucking bronco.”
Those fifteen seconds were enough. The flight was a success, and Binnie handled the violent force of going Mach 1.2 like a pro, producing a sonic boom that signaled mission accomplished: SpaceShipOne had broken the sound barrier.
“That was a pretty wild ride, Mr. Rutan,” he told the ground crew below, as he prepared to come back to Earth.
But as he approached the runway, Binnie was having difficulty keeping the spacecraft level. He was coming in low. Finally he slammed into the ground—hard.
The landing gear splayed outward, like a gymnast doing a split. The bottom of the plane hit the ground like a belly flop, and it tipped over so that the left wing dragged along the tarmac. After skidding a few hundred feet, SpaceShipOne careened off the runway into the brown desert dirt, kicking up an ignominious dust plume.
In the mission control room, Rutan jumped out of his seat and then bolted out to the runway. First responders rushed to the crash site.
Binnie wasn’t hurt. But he was furious.
“Damn it,” Binnie said, again. And then again. He ripped off his oxygen mask, and went to smack the ceiling of the cockpit before controlling himself.
Rutan was there within moments, trying to calm down his pilot, who was now standing, embarrassed, next to the aircraft he had just crashed.
“Hey, other than that, how was the flight?” Rutan said, trying to soften the blow with humor.
But the former navy fighter pilot was inconsolable.
“Words cannot describe how disappointed—” he began.
Rutan wouldn’t hear of it.
“You did a super job,” he said. “All we’ve got there is real minor stuff. It’s not a big deal.”
The crash was a setback, and, for Binnie, humiliating. This was the first big milestone for the SpaceShipOne program. But now Binnie wondered whether he had just blown his chance to get to space.
The engineers at Scaled would later determine it wasn’t Binnie’s fault; the flight controls just got stuck on the reentry, overwhelmed with friction in a condition pilots call “stickiction.” This was, after all, a test flight, emphasis on “test.” The whole point was to push the envelope to see what sorts of problems emerged.
But the competition didn’t see it that way, and wasn’t afraid to say so publicly.
“He flat didn’t fly the airplane,” Melvill told Popular Science magazine, comments that infuriated Binnie. “He just flew it straight into the ground, like what you would do when flying an F-18 onto the deck.”
(Later, in a letter to the editor, Melvill said that he was “deeply hurt by your unfortunate decision to include a comment I don’t recall ever making when being interviewed for what I understood to be a completely different article. Brian Binnie is a close friend and one of the best pilots I know.” He also wrote that the magazine “used a comment out of context, simply to try to sensationalize a story that was already sensational.”)
Despite the crash landing, Rutan couldn’t help but be happy—the flight had been a success. They’d broken the sound barrier. They had all these data now on the spacecraft’s performance that would help them get to space. That’s what he was focused on.
“How was the boost?” Rutan asked Binnie after the flight.
The pilot hesitated a moment. “Uhh,” he said. “Pretty wild. The kick and trying to keep the wings level, all of that was pretty dynamic. Just when you think you’ve got it under control, something different would happen.”
In other words, to fly SpaceShipOne, you didn’t just need to be a pilot. It might also help to have some experience in the rodeo.
RUTAN WAS THE public face of the program, the brash engineer who said he wanted “to go high because that’s where the view is.” But until he unveiled SpaceShipOne several months before Binnie’s flight, he had treated it like a classified program, demanding the highest level of secrecy. That was in part because he didn’t want word of what he was trying to accomplish to get out. But it was also because his newest customer—Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates—was a mysterious and reclusive figure with enough wealth to buy a cloak of anonymity.
Like Bezos and Musk, Allen was an avid science fiction reader as a kid, fascinated by space. His father was the associate director of the University of Washington’s library, where Allen would spend hours after school. “My dad was just letting me loose in the stacks,” he said, sitting in a conference room outside his Seattle office, with a view of the Space Needle. “I loved it.” He read Willy Ley and books about Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket. He became fascinated with engines, and turbo pumps and propellants.
Allen knew all the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts as if they were the players of his favorite baseball team, and he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up. But then in the sixth grade, he no longer could see the blackboard, even from his front row seat. His nearsightedness meant “my dreams of being an astronaut were over,” he said. “Somehow I knew you had to have perfect eyesight to be a test pilot, and so that was it for my astronaut career.”
He once tried to launch the arm of an aluminum chair by packing it with powdered zinc and sulfur and firing it from a coffeepot, he recalled in his memoir, Idea Man. It didn’t work.
“Turns out the melting point of aluminum was lower than I understood,” he said.
As an adult, his passion for space continued. In 1981, he went to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the first shuttle launch. “The sound was unbelievable,” he recalled. “The air was vibrating, and you could feel compression waves going into your chest.… You could feel the heat from the engines on your face.” Allen watched it alongside the tens of thousands who had packed the Florida coastline, so many yelling, “Go! Go! Go! It was so inspiring.”
After he had cofounded Microsoft, Allen was one of the richest men in the world, free to pursue his passions. An avid sports fan, he bought the Portland Trailblazers and the Seattle Seahawks. In Seattle, he opened the Museum of Pop Culture. He was also keenly interested in aviation and amassed a collection of historic World War II fighter planes that would eventually go on display at his Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum.
In 1996, the year the X Prize was announced, he went to Mojave to visit Rutan and chat about his plans to build a supersonic jet that could fly over the atmosphere. They stayed in touch, and two years later, Rutan flew to see Allen in Seattle to propose something even more ambitious—his plan to develop SpaceShipOne. It would be another two years before he felt he had a design that could work.
Allen was sold and would invest more than $20 million in a venture that, if successful, would pay out half of that.
Rutan knew that if word of his latest project leaked, he’d inevitably be laughed at, ridiculed. And he didn’t want the distraction of anyone, not his fellow aviation engineers, not the press, not anyone, telling him what he was trying to do was impossible.
Then again, he had a different relationship with the word than most. One of Rutan’s favorite sayings was that it’s not research unless half the people involved think what you’re trying to do is impossible. He urged his engineers to take risks and told them that “a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.”
They—the doubters, the skeptics—said he couldn’t build Voyager, which in 1986 became the first airplane to circle the globe without stopping in a trip that took 9 days, 44 minutes, and 30 seconds. And that’s what they would say now.
Rutan had become one of the most accomplished aerospace engineers of his generation—with several of his aircraft retiring to the National Air and Space Museum. But soon he was looking for the next frontier. Upset with what he saw as the retreat of America’s space program, he would tell the New York Times that “NASA has almost ground itself to a full stop.” To Rutan’s thinking, the agency had become another bloated government bureaucracy, subject to the fickle whims of Congress and ever-changing administrations.
The space shuttle, which was supposed to fly safely and affordably, had accomplished neither, and was viewed by its skeptics as an expensive death trap that had killed fourteen astronauts in two catastrophic explosions. Worse, it had sent NASA scurrying into retreat, scaring the once bold agency into a risk-averse bureaucracy.
As far as Rutan was concerned, the government had abdicated its monopoly in space. Only the private sector could advance spaceflight now, he thought. It could innovate and move quickly in a way no government agency could.
So, he would build the world’s first commercial spaceship. That was the secret, the project he was keeping covert, shielded from the derision he knew it would attract. Scaled Composites, the cynics would say, a company of just a few dozen people, could not start a manned space program.
Until it did.
ON JUNE 21, 2004, six months after Binnie broke the sound barrier, and several test flights later, Rutan was ready to try a test flight to space.
After the hard landing, Binnie didn’t think his chances of being picked were very good. Even though it wasn’t his fault, he was beginning to feel “benched on the sidelines,” as if the prevailing attitude at the company was that he “crashed it because I flew it like a damn navy guy into the ground. The entire undercurrent was clearly I don’t have the right stuff: ‘Just look at the mess he made of the vehicle.’ That stigma and that undercurrent was very much the persistent attitude of the company.”
The relationship between the test pilots had grown strained as they competed for the available slots. “Instead of us working together, passing on lessons learned and because of the secrecy it pitted us all against each other,” Binnie said. “It was a very corrosive environment in that regard.”
On the day the announcement was made, Siebold was in Binnie’s office, discussing an issue with the aircraft’s avionics, when Binnie received an e-mail from the flight test director. Binnie knew this was it—the announcement he’d been dreading.
“Do I want to read the bad news now or wait until after lunch?” he thought to himself.
He opened it.
“Look at this,” he said to Siebold, trying to stay casual. “Mike’s the next guy up.”
Siebold, normally able to retain a test pilot’s preternatural calm no matter what, “turned beet red, totally agitated,” Binnie recalled, “totally flummoxed that he somehow had lost out on an opportunity that apparently he had lobbied for quite hard.”
The team just had a higher comfort level with Melvill, Rutan’s trusted confidant for nearly three decades. Of all the test flights, this was the big one—the first attempt to reach the 100-kilometer barrier of space. If anything went wrong, Rutan knew he could rely on the experienced pilot, despite his age. And Melvill had just recently proven, once again, that he had the right stuff to pull off a stunt as crazy, and dangerous, as this.
On an earlier test flight of SpaceShipOne, the flight navigation system went out just as he had hit the ignition switch and was screaming upward, almost perfectly vertical. Everyone in mission control figured Melvill would just cut the engine, end the flight, and come back safely. Flying that fast without a navigation system would be insane.
Instead, Melvill kept the motor on for the full fifty-five-second burn, flying 3,400 feet per second, or faster than a speeding bullet, all while flying essentially blind. His only navigation tool was to look out the window from the corner of his eye at the horizon. He nailed the flight, and the landing, leaving Rutan, a hard man to impress, in awe.
On the ground, Rutan celebrated with his friend, telling him about what it was like watching him from mission control.
“Everybody’s expecting you to abort,” Rutan said. “And I said, ‘He’s going to run it at least thirty seconds.’ And then I said, ‘No, he’s going to run it at least forty seconds.’ And then I said, ‘No, he’s going to run it all the way!’”
“Damn right,” Melvill replied.
Rutan acknowledged to Popular Science that “in some places, that would get a test pilot fired. In this case, I thought it was a positive that Mike could hang in there and press on.”
But to Siebold, the move was evidence of unnecessary risk, not bravery, and he had misgivings about Melvill’s selection for the attempt to reach the threshold of space.
This was going to be the big one—if Melvill was successful, he’d go down in history as the first pilot to fly a truly commercial, nongovernment vehicle to space and back. Siebold wrote in an e-mail that Melvill was a “cowboy” who flew loose and risky, according to Julian Guthrie’s book on the X Prize, How to Make a Spaceship. Rutan got ahold of the e-mail and showed it to Melvill to pump up his competitive juices against the younger rival.
“See what you’re up against,” Rutan told his pilot, according to the book.
Binnie didn’t know about the e-mail, but Siebold tried to convince him to join the chorus against Melvill. “He thought it was reckless and cowboylike behavior, and he tried to get me to sign up to that,” Binnie recalled.
He refused. Stuff happens in the air, especially in experimental aircraft, and Binnie said he would have done the same thing in Melvill’s situation.
If Binnie had been cast as the guy who crashed the plane, Siebold had been branded as too cautious. On one of his earlier test flights, he faced a dilemma. After SpaceShipOne was released, he noticed that one of the wing flaps appeared to be stalling. If he flew, he feared he wouldn’t be able to control the spacecraft. But if he didn’t, he’d land with a tank full of fuel that made the aircraft too heavy for a safe landing.
As he talked it over with mission control, crucial seconds were ticking away—as he was falling faster and faster. Finally, mission control told him he needed to light the engine. Landing with that much fuel was just too dangerous. Siebold did, and flew safely.
When Siebold was back on the ground, Rutan greeted him warmly and congratulated him. But because Siebold had waited so long to light the motor, he didn’t reach the altitude he was supposed to, meaning he didn’t achieve the goal Rutan had set for him. The deliberative, careful approach was perhaps the right way to handle a potentially serious problem. No one wanted a dead pilot. But it was also the opposite of how Melvill had just gone for it when he was faced with a problem.
Still, for this first flight to space, one of the members of the team advocated for Siebold, whose flights in the simulator were impressive.
“Yeah,” Rutan concurred. But he still had this reservation about Siebold: “He might quit.”
“Pete didn’t achieve the goals of his first rocket-powered flight in SpaceShipOne because he couldn’t bring himself to throw the switch and light the motor at the right time,” Rutan said later. “Mike and Brian had come off the hooks and thrown the switch.”
Melvill would be the pilot for the first launch to space. “A gutsy call,” Allen recalled in his memoir. “Despite Mike’s 6,400 hours of flight time, this would be well beyond anything he had done.”
The decision left Siebold disappointed.
“I think every one of us wishes that we could be on that vehicle, and fly that really challenging flight,” Siebold told a documentary film crew from the Discovery Network. “This flight is what’s going to get the attention of the world. This is the flight which says, ‘Hey, NASA, we’re here.’”
At a press conference the day before the flight, the three pilots stood shoulder to shoulder in their flight suits, presenting a unified front. Rutan announced his lineup: Binnie would fly WhiteKnightOne, the mothership; Melvill would fly SpaceShipOne, with Siebold as his backup.
Rutan acknowledged the danger of what they were trying to do, saying, “We are willing to seek breakthroughs by taking risks. And if the business-as-usual space developers continue their decades-long pace, they will be gazing from the slow lane as we speed into the new space age.”
Taking the podium, Paul Allen said they were chasing history.
“Tomorrow, we will attempt to add a new page to the aviation history books. If our attempt is successful, SpaceShipOne’s pilot will become the first civilian pilot to ever cross the boundary of space in a completely privately funded vehicle.”
Left unsaid was the fact that he was nervous about Melvill’s safety. So was his wife, Sally, a pilot herself, who just before the flight implored her husband just to “come home to me.”
“I’ve had any number of people, guys as well as women, come to me and say, ‘Well, how can you let him do that?’” she said in the Discovery Channel documentary Black Sky. “I don’t believe I have the right to tell him what he can and can’t do. Even if I think it is high risk and life threatening and whatever. I mean, this is his ultimate joy.”
Melvill knew the risks—and how terrified his wife was. He’d been a test pilot for years, but he noticed how she’d be a lot more nervous the older he got. This was unlike anything he had ever done. The spacecraft would be flying three times the speed of sound, faster than it had ever flown before to a height of 62 miles. And the crew at Scaled Composites had made some last-minute adjustments to the vehicle that they hadn’t yet had a chance to test.
Sitting in the cockpit just before the flight, Rutan came over for one last pep talk.
“This is the big one, Burt,” Melvill told him, as the men exchanged an extended handshake. “Thanks so much for the opportunity.”
“We’ve got the right guy,” Rutan replied. “It’s just an airplane. Don’t worry about it.”
Along the tarmac, thousands of onlookers had gathered, many arriving in the predawn darkness to witness what they knew could be historic—or disastrous.
In the air, Melvill seemed relaxed and ready. When he hit the ignition, Sally, watching through a pair of binoculars, yelled out, “Go, Michael! Go, babe!”
The flight started with the usual violent jump, as Melvill fought to point SpaceShipOne straight up. But just eight seconds into the flight, he got pushed off course by the wind. As he struggled with the controls, the engine roared angrily, shaking the spacecraft. Then, he heard a series of bangs that set his imagination running wild. Had a piece of SpaceShipOne broken off?
Still, he kept climbing and climbing until the engine shut off and he floated on. His early problem had knocked him more than 20 miles off course. But it appeared that he had—just barely—crossed the 62-mile threshold.
“Wow,” he told mission control. “You would not believe the view. Holy mackerel.”
Rutan turned around to congratulate Allen, shaking his hand, flashing a wide-eyed smile. But soon they realized there was another problem. A trim flap on Rutan’s feather system, the shuttlecock-like device that was to deliver him to ground safely, was malfunctioning. If the stabilizer didn’t work, SpaceShipOne would enter a violent spin, and Melvill could easily be killed on the reentry.
This was the moment he was supposed to be celebrating. Melvill had made it to space. Outside he could see the thin layer of the atmosphere and the curvature of Earth. He could see the deep, vast blackness of space. But instead of taking in the moment, he worried about how he’d get back to Sally.
On the ground, she was a jumble of nerves, now huddled around a walkie-talkie, her hands clutched together as if in prayer, listening to her husband and mission control sort out the mess he was in.
“This is not good,” someone in mission control said.
Melvill tried to adjust the stabilizer system again, and after a few seconds it worked. He’d be okay. Relieved, now he could enjoy the little time he had left in space, before gravity pulled him back to Earth. He pulled out a couple handfuls of M&M’s that he had secretly stashed in the left shoulder pocket of his flight suit, which in the weightless environment floated through the cockpit, pinging gently off the windows. He finally allowed himself a moment to enjoy a view that only the some four hundred people who had been to space before him had ever seen.
Moments later, as he guided SpaceShipOne to a flawless landing, Sally Melvill, her hands clutched again in front of her, was near tears. “Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you!” she said to no one in particular.
After her husband emerged, she broke down in his arms.
“Thanks for coming home,” she said, sobbing. “Can we grow old together in rocking chairs?”
He said they could. He was, as of now, retired as a SpaceShipOne test pilot. He had made history, earning the first ever “commercial astronaut” wings from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Rutan was ecstatic, and said later that he was glad it was Melvill in the cockpit, and not anyone else. “The more experienced people would have aborted two or three of the flights, which would have set us back many months,” he said.
Now, he had proven that a small band of dedicated, passionate rocketeers could pull off a feat no one thought possible. But beyond that the flight didn’t just symbolize the emergence of the commercial space industry, a New Space movement, but, he felt, the obsolescence of NASA.
After Melvill landed safely, Rutan grabbed a sign from the cheering crowd that summed up exactly what he was thinking and waved it proudly:
“SpaceShipOne, GovernmentZero.”
WHILE ALLEN WAS a space enthusiast, he made an uncomfortable pioneer. The SpaceShipOne flights made him realize that he did not have the stomach for the risk of human spaceflight, and instead of enjoying the historic feats, he was petrified that the pilots flying his spacecraft would be killed.
During Binnie’s first powered flight, Allen was overcome by “a wave of dread,” he wrote. When developing computer software, “your worst outcome is an error message. Now I knew the person whose life hung in the balance, and I found that hard to handle.” And when Binnie crashed, he felt as if his “heart was in my throat,” wondering whether Binnie was hurt.
Just before the X Prize flights, Allen had received a call from Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic, who had begun a space venture of his own and was looking for a vehicle to acquire. If Allen was a recluse who valued secrecy and shuddered at the dangers of spaceflight, Branson was his opposite, a thrill-seeking, media-savvy marketer who pursued one adventure after the next.
Branson, who started an airline and a train company, and had been on several daredevil, record-setting hot-air balloon rides, was desperate to start a company that could help push what he saw as the ultimate frontier of space. Smitten with SpaceShipOne, and confident that Rutan could build him an even bigger and better spacecraft, one capable of taking fleets of tourists into the cosmos, Branson made Allen a generous offer for the rights to the technology behind SpaceShipOne.
“Flying test pilots, I understand,” Allen recalled. “But paying-man-on-the-street-type passengers, I wanted to leave that to someone else.”
Allen would see the X Prize through, but then he was eager to move on to other ventures. So, he sold the rights in a deal worth up to $25 million over fifteen years. Branson, who had added Virgin Galactic to the list of companies he ran under the Virgin brand, quickly had the Virgin logo painted on SpaceShipOne just in time for its X Prize flights.
BY SEPTEMBER, RUTAN’S team was done with test flights and was ready to go for the money. To win the $10 million Ansari X Prize, SpaceShipOne would have to fly to space twice in two weeks, while reusing at least 80 percent of the vehicle.
Rutan decided to go with Siebold for the first prize flight. Binnie would be the backup—and was beginning to fear that because of the crash landing they’d never let him fly again. “I understand the concept of 3 strikes you’re out,” he wrote in an angry e-mail to the flight director. “I just don’t know what the count is anymore.”
Melvill had done his part. And it wasn’t clear that his wife, Sally, could take his flying another harrowing ride like that, no matter how thrilling it was. Siebold had been upset that he wasn’t chosen for the first space attempt, and had been training for this mission for more than three years.
But suddenly Siebold was getting second thoughts. His wife had just had a baby, and in the weeks leading up to the flight, he had a brush with a potentially serious illness. But he also felt the plane was unsafe and needed further testing.
There were plenty of signs that the engineers were still working out the kinks of the aircraft. Melvill had gone 20 miles off course on one flight, and had trouble with the stabilizer on the other. The flight controls froze up on Binnie, causing his crash landing. A new father, Siebold had a tough decision to make. As hard as it was to disappoint Rutan and the rest of the team at Scaled Composites, he couldn’t go through with it. The flight was just too dangerous.
“Peter to his credit had lost faith in all the haste to light a wick under the rocket motor,” Binnie wrote in an unpublished memoir titled “The Magic and Menace of SpaceShipOne.” “He felt that it was unsafe, insufficiently tested and poorly understood. To him, that was three strikes in a critical spaceship system and not worth the risk.”
Scaled Composites would tell the public that Siebold was merely sick, and never let on about his concerns that the spacecraft was unsafe and not fully tested. It was already mid-September. The first flight was just days away, and the whole point of the exercise, after all, was to convince the public that spaceflight could be made so safe it would be routine.
With days to go before the flight, Rutan had to again ask his trusted and tested friend Mike Melvill. After the last harrowing flight, Rutan knew Melvill had a “feeling of relief that I didn’t die today, and that I won’t die in the program because I’m done.” But then the team “had to go to him to fly another spaceflight.”
Binnie was furious and stormed into the flight director’s office, demanding to know “when is the backup not the backup.”
The flight director “cut to the chase and said that the landing from last year did not sit well with the Boss and suggested his attempts to work me back into the lineup were thwarted,” Binnie wrote in his memoir. “So there it was. And it was worse than I had ever imagined. I felt defeated.”
While Rutan said that the controls had frozen up on Binnie during the landing, he said “we were not able to go to Brian because Brian had been so tied up with rocket development and everyone questioned his proficiency when he made the hard landing.… We couldn’t put Brian into the flight because we didn’t think he was ready.”
Sally Melvill burst into tears when she got the news that her husband would fly again.
“To be honest, I was very irritated,” she told the Discovery Channel. “I had settled my mind that he was not going to do another flight. So I had my emotions really where I needed them to be. And to start working and trying to get mentally prepared—and Michael had the same problem.”
It wasn’t just the mental adjustment that concerned them. He hadn’t been preparing physically. To get ready for the violent churns of the flight—the increased gravitational forces that would strain their body—the pilots had trained hard in test airplanes. They put themselves into dizzying tailspins, banked hard, flew upside down—all in an effort to get their body ready.
Melvill hadn’t had time to train properly, and superstitious as he was, he wondered whether this flight might be one too many. Shortly after Rutan said he needed him, he told his wife that he “wondered if I was pushing my luck doing a second flight. Am I asking too much?”
Sally Melvill wondered that, too.
THE FLIGHT ON September 29 started as expected. WhiteKnightOne climbed into the early morning Mojave sky. It released SpaceShipOne, and then a few seconds later the rocket engine ignited, pinning Melvill back into his seat as he screamed almost straight up in a picture-perfect beginning.
From the ground, it looked just as it should. “He’s straight!” Sally Melvill yelled. “He’s straight! He’s absolutely dead straight.”
But then SpaceShipOne started to roll. It was slow at first, but the higher he climbed, the faster the spacecraft spun, until soon it was whirling uncontrollably. The nose of the craft was still pointed toward the sky, but the wings were whipping around so quickly that the sun was flickering in the cabin, as if someone was turning a light switch on and off.
Melvill kept his head straight, focusing only on the control panel in front of him. He didn’t dare look out the window. Seeing the world spin below him would only rattle his nerves—and make him sick. Just as he had on the earlier flight when his navigation system went out, he kept the engine firing. Spinning be damned. He was still climbing toward space.
Finally, he crossed the 62-mile boundary and by firing thrusters on the spacecraft, was able to slow the rate of the spin, just in time for reentry.
Once again, it had been a harrowing ride. But once again, Melvill stayed in the saddle all the way to space.
One flight down for the $10 million prize, one to go.
THE NEXT DAY, a Thursday, the team gathered for a meeting. Everything seemed a go for the second flight, which they’d push ahead for the following Monday. Despite not having flown since the crash, ten months earlier, Binnie tried to remain sharp, spending hours in the simulator, hoping he’d have a chance, even if he felt he was a long shot.
They went through the logistics. The avionics looked good. Everyone was happy with the flight profile. The rocket seemed good. They were all set, and about to wrap up, when the crew chief raised his hand.
“Burt, I need one last piece of information,” he said. “And that’s the pilot.”
After an uncomfortable silence, the test flight director said, “Well, Brian is, of course.”
Melvill was done. Siebold had pulled himself out of the program. Binnie was really the only one left. He felt he was the pilot of last resort, as if, as he said, everyone in the meeting was thinking, “We have nowhere else to turn but to the guy who crashes spaceships.”
With the flight just days away, he didn’t have time to brood. And the former navy pilot wanted to redeem himself.
Now out of the running, Melvill generously helped prepare him, taking him up for test flights in his plane.
On the morning of the flight on October 4, Binnie made his way toward the spacecraft and saw his mother-in-law. Carrying a cup of coffee, she came to give him a good-luck hug. But as she reached her arms around him, she ended up spilling coffee down his back. Binnie didn’t have any time to change—and didn’t have another flight suit anyway, “so I manned up with this sticky mess all over me.”
He was wet, and the smell of sugary coffee overwhelmed the cockpit. But he was ready.
The WhiteKnightOne mothership released SpaceShipOne. Instead of waiting for mission control to give the all clear before igniting the engines, Binnie flipped the switches almost immediately, not wanting to lose too much altitude, and zoomed right by the mothership, where a surprised engineer on board yelped, “Holy crap! That was close!”
But other than that, the flight went as smooth as could be. He reached higher than Melvill had gone in his two earlier flights, setting a new record for a commercial spacecraft.
Now partners, Allen and Branson came to the Mojave Desert to witness Binnie clinch the victory, and could not have made a more different pair. Here was Branson with his gilded flowing hair, Virgin Islands tan, standing next to Allen, pale and pasty in baggy jeans.
“Paul, isn’t this better than the best sex you ever had?” Branson asked him, as the spaceship climbed higher.
“If I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn’t enjoy it very much,” Allen thought.
Binnie nailed the landing—no belly flops this time—a nice soft touchdown right in the middle of the runway.
“He greased it on like an air force pilot, not a navy pilot,” Rutan said. “He flew the only perfect flight of SpaceShipOne. I was very proud of him.”
During the celebration, Rutan once again took aim at NASA.
“I was thinking a little bit about that other space agency, the big guys,” he said. “I think they’re looking at each other now and saying, ‘We’re screwed.’”
To underscore the point, NASA wasn’t flying at all at the time. Space Shuttle Columbia had disintegrated years before, killing another seven astronauts. The shuttle program was grounded while investigators tried to figure out what went wrong. In all of 2004, the US government did not fly a single spaceflight.
In fact there were only five trips to space that year. The Russians flew two. Burt Rutan flew the other three.
This was the triumph of the little guy, the individual, a uniquely American moment. “I just thank God that I live in a country where this is possible,” Binnie said.
For their flights, the FAA had largely stayed out of the way. Since no one but the government had ever even attempted to fly to space, there weren’t any laws preventing what they were doing. And what regulations were in place were lax. For now. Congress would surely take notice, and hold hearings to discuss what regulations should govern this new industry.
But all that was for a later day. Now was a time to celebrate. Rutan gathered the Scaled Composites team in front of the hangar.
“The important thing about today’s accomplishment is this is not an end,” he said, as Allen stood next to him. “It’s just a very good beginning.”
Rutan and Allen then popped champagne, letting the bubbly flow. Rutan took a big swig directly from the bottle.
At the same time, Branson was already dreaming of the next spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo. Rutan was on board to build it. But this time he’d be doing so for Sir Richard, the playboy who always liked a splash. Their new spaceship wouldn’t be built so that it could win a prize. It would be designed for luxury, for as many as six passengers and two pilots, with the kind of first-class touches that Branson was known for at Virgin Atlantic, his airline.
At the moment, the spacecraft was still just a vision in his head. But he couldn’t wait to show it off.