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SpaceShipOne ranks among the world's first spaceplanes in the first 50 years of human spaceflight, with the North American X-15, Space Shuttle, Buran, and Boeing X-37. SpaceShipOne is the second spaceplane to have launched from a mother ship, preceded only by the North American X-15.
SpaceShipOne also does not carry the same crew (3 members vs. 7) or payload (negligible vs. 25 tons), and makes much shorter flights (a few minutes vs. several days). The SpaceShipOne program is a technical achievement more on a par with the X-15 than the Shuttle.
The White Knight and SpaceShipOne were designed by Burt Rutan and manufactured by Scaled Composites, a private company founded by Rutan in 1982. On three separate flights in 2004, White Knight conducted SpaceShipOne into flight, and SpaceShipOne then performed a sub-orbital spaceflight , becoming the first private craft to reach space.
In 2008, Virgin Galactic ordered two White Knight Two vehicles. [6] Together, WK2 and SS2 were to form the basis for Virgin Galactic's fleet of suborbital spaceplanes.. In November 2010, The Spaceship Company had announced that it planned to build at least three additional White Knight Two aircraft and an additional five SpaceShipTwo rocket planes, the aircraft to be built by Virgin after the ...
RocketMotorTwo is a hybrid rocket engine utilizing solid hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) fuel and liquid nitrous oxide oxidizer – sometimes referred to as an N 2 O/HTPB motor [8] [9] – providing 70,000 pounds-force (310 kN) of thrust. [10] The design makes use of lessons learned during the development of the SpaceShipOne hybrid ...
SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two were, respectively, roughly twice the size of the first-generation SpaceShipOne and mothership White Knight, which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004. SpaceShipTwo had 43 and 33 cm (17 and 13 in)-diameter windows for the passengers' viewing pleasure, [ 30 ] and all seats reclined back during landing to decrease the ...
This flight was a full-altitude test, but not itself a competitive flight for the Ansari X Prize, the prize for the first non-governmental reusable crewed spacecraft. Problems were encountered during the flight but later corrected, paving the way for SpaceShipOne to make competitive flights later in 2004.
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