Dreamers Hope a Catalyst Will Rise From the Mojave Desert.

One week from today, from a runway in a barren reach of the Mojave Desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, Burt Rutan will try sending a pilot higher than anyone has ever flown in a private plane.

A longtime designer of innovative aircraft, he plans to shoot his creation, a rocket called SpaceShipOne, 62 miles above the earth. If the flight is successful, Mr. Rutan and his sponsor, Paul G. Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, say it will usher in an age of privately financed space travel and even spacefaring laboratories and manufacturing plants, at down-to-earth prices.

The flight next week is a two-step process. An aircraft, the White Knight, will carry SpaceShipOne from the runway to 50,000 feet, where it will be released. SpaceShipOne will then glide until the pilot fires the rocket motor for about 80 seconds and the craft accelerates to three times the speed of sound.

The pilot, whose name will be announced the day before the flight, will then cut the motor and feel three minutes of weightlessness as the ship reaches the top of its climb in the black sky of space. Then it will fall back toward the earth, and the pilot will glide it back to the runway.

In a sense, the flight is old news: humans have been blasted into space for more than 40 years. But those efforts have been financed by governments. Mr. Rutan, who heads his own aircraft design company, Scaled Composites, says his goal with SpaceShipOne is to show that space is no longer a territory reachable only through the resources of empires, just as the Wright brothers proved that the skies were not just for birds and balloonists.

“The whole world realized that, for crying out loud, these are just bicycle shop guys,” he said of the Wright brothers. In the same way, he said, if he succeeds, “people around the world might say, ‘Wait a minute - I can do this!’ ”

But that might not happen any time soon. For one thing, legislation that would allow commercial spaceports for human travel is stalled in Congress. “Without timely legislation, the flight might be a mere passing stunt instead of the herald of a new era,” said Charles Lurio, an independent space consultant.

Although some of the other teams competing for the X Prize are operating secretly, none are believed to be as far along as the Rutan-Allen group.

The rivals say they are cheering Mr. Rutan and Mr. Allen on. “Ultimately, we are all on the same team,” said Geoff Sheerin, who heads Canadian Arrow, a team with a sleek spacecraft design that evokes Buck Rogers. But he added, “You don’t have a prize until you have a prize.”

The suborbital flight is less punishing than what NASA puts space shuttles through; the speed required to reach orbit is a blistering 25 times the speed of sound, and the risks of heating and damage from re-entering the atmosphere are enormous. “It’s a safe first step,” said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, the chairman of the X Prize Foundation. “Or, I should say, a safer first step.”

The flight of SpaceShipOne will not be risk-free. Atmospheric stress will be high, and unforeseen problems could emerge.

“That’s part of being a test pilot,” Mr. Allen said. “The people that undertake these things know the risks and do everything possible to minimize the risks. But they are still there, and they are still real.” As for his own desire to reach space, he said, “I’m going to wait until there’s quite a few more test flights down the road.”

Source: New York Times