News Archive / Tagged: SpaceShipOne

• Our SpaceFlight Heritage: SpaceShipOne, Government Zero – 13 years later

  Jason RhianJune 21st, 2017

  It was a heady time for the emerging NewSpace movement, Scaled Composites had sent Mike Melvill in SpaceShipOne on flight 15P up 62 miles into space. This set the stage for them to win the Ansari X-PRIZE and from there send the first tourists on suborbital hops. Or, so they hoped. Thirteen years later, the follow-on vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, has yet to send a single tourist to sub-orbit.

• Our SpaceFlight Heritage: SpaceShipOne – Small step

  Jason RhianJune 21st, 2015

  Flight 15P does not have much of a ring to it. In fact, Flight 15P was similar to missions NASA carried out under the X-15 program that ran from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. However, Flight 15P marked the first time that a privately-funded spacecraft carried an astronaut, one not trained by a government, to […]

• OPINION: Commercial space learns a valuable, painful lesson

  Collin SkocikNovember 2nd, 2014

  It’s been a bad week for commercial space companies. On Tuesday, Oct. 28, Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus cargo ship Deke Slayton was destroyed when the Antares rocket carrying it exploded just after liftoff from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Barely three days later, on Friday, Oct. 31, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed east of Mojave. No […]

• A decade after SpaceShipOne’s triumphant flight – commercial flights still a ways off

  Jason RhianOctober 5th, 2014

  When Brian Binnie took off, inside SpaceShipOne, which was safely tucked under Scaled Composites’ White Knight One aircraft, it looked as if the promise of the NewSpace era – was finally about to come true. More than a decade after the historic “17P” flight– the world is still waiting. With the successful conclusion of the 17P […]