The world’s first privately manned spacecraft was set to skirt the fringes of space Wednesday in a bid to snatch a 10-million-dollar prize aimed at kickstarting space tourism.
SpaceShipOne, which in June entered history as the first non-military space rocket, will stage its second sub-orbital flight in California’s Mojave desert, in what its creators hailed as the start of a new space race.
The flight was scheduled to take place just two days after Burt Rutan and British tycoon Richard Branson announced a tie-up to start a “galactic” airline aimed at taking a huge step towards commercial space travel.
SpaceShipOne will seek to equal its June 21 feat when it touched the edge of space, 62 miles (100 kilometers) up, before making what its creator Rutan admitted had been a scary return to base here.
Rutan was upbeat about the prospects for Wednesday’s flight of his stubby rocket plane, which — if successful — will take him and his US team halfway to pocketing the 10-million-dollar Ansari X prize.
To win the prize being offered by the non-profit US-based X Prize Foundation, a manned, reuseable spacecraft must be sent into space twice in two weeks.
“We are all very confident that we can pull this off and turn it around very quickly,” the 61-year-old Rutan said, vowing to better the 328,000 foot sub-orbit SpaceShipOne achieved in June.
