The winged SpaceShipOne is being designed for suborbital flights to an altitude of about 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, before gliding like an airplane back to Earth. This 15-minute flight profile is similar to ones flown in 1961 by early Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, and is much shorter in distance and flight time than orbital flights such as John Glenn’s on Mercury and the Space Shuttle. Suborbital flights vastly simplify liftoff rocket engine and reentry thermal protection requirements compared to orbital missions, making a private ventures such as the X Prize and SpaceShipOne difficult but feasible for private companies. SpaceShipOne uses a hybrid rocket engine with both solid and liquid fuels and foldable wings to enhance aerodynamic handling during re-entry. Its crew operates in a shirtsleeve environment without spacesuits; Scaled Composits is already training an astronaut coprs of four employees. It begins it missions attached to the underside of a twin-engine, high-altitude aircraft called White Knight which made its first test flight last summer.

“I want to go high because that’s where the view is,” Rutan said. “The event is not about dreams, predictions or mockups. We will show actual flight hardware: an aircraft for high-altitude airborne launch, a flight-ready manned spaceship, a new, ground-tested rocket propulsion system and much more. This is not just the development of another research aircraft, but a complete manned space program with all its support elements.” After the announcement, Rutan and his team plan to go back into seclusion and go back to work.

Godspeed, Burt Rutan.