AOPA Pilot Magazine - June 2013 - 69

ILLUSTRATION: STEVE KARP; COURTESY OF SCALED COMPOSITES, LLC; TOP: MICHAL TODOROVIC

Gs, compressing Melvill into his
seat. He had to strain to keep
the blood flowing to his head
and remain conscious as the
powerful forces collided.
Outside, wind noise and otherworldly sounds increased
with an alarming volume
and intensity.
“I was not afraid all the
way up,” he said. “But I was a
little afraid on the way down.
Boy, when you reenter at 2.9
Mach and you start hitting the
atmosphere, the noises you hear
are somebody talking to you very,
very sharply. You know, you begin to
think, wow, should I be doing this?”
At an altitude of about 60,000 feet,
Melvill reconfigured SpaceShipOne as a
glider. The streamlined shape allowed him
to take control and maneuver the craft
with a conventional stick and rudder pedals, providing comfort to the veteran pilot.
Even though SpaceShipOne had begun
its descent more than 20 miles from the
place program engineers had intended,
gliding that extra distance was easily done
from Melvill’s high perch. But the aircraft
was out of trim, and Melvill decided to leave
it that way. If the trim system had been compromised during ascent, he didn’t want to
exacerbate the situation by changing it now.
The approach and touchdown on
Runway 30 at Mojave went according to

UNLIKE OTHER spacecraft,

SpaceShipOne depended on
an extraordinary degree of
stick-and-rudder pilot skills.
In many years of close
collaboration, Melvill (top) and
designer Burt Rutan (above right)
created and tested a stunning
variety of pioneering aircraft.
In its aerodynamically clean
configuration, SpaceShipOne was
a sleek glider. Its nose (far left)
was made in the same mold as
the nearly identical cockpit of the
White Knight carrier airplane.

civilian spacecraft to fly to space
twice within a two-week period.
The Scaled Composites
team soon discovered the reasons for the roll (wind shear),
and made the required trim
system adjustments. The
bang was caused by the failure of a fairing and quickly
remedied. Melvill made
another space flight on
September 29, and astronaut
Brian Binnie—a former U.S.
Navy test pilot—made the final
rocket-powered

plan, and much as the previous unpowered
flights had ended. For reasons of lightness
and simplicity, SpaceShipOne didn’t have
brakes. Melvill simply rolled to a stop on
the nose skid.
More than 25,000 people had come
to Mojave to watch the launch, and millions more tuned in on television. Former
NASA astronaut Edwin Eugene “Buzz”
Aldrin Jr. was there, as well as then-FAA
Administrator Marion Blakey.
“I knew there was a high level of interest in the work we had been doing, but I was
surprised and deeply touched that so many
people came out to wish us well that day,”
he said. “It meant a great deal to everyone
on the Scaled team who had put heart and
soul into the project.”
Rutan was elated by the success—but
also focused on the problems that caused
the uncommanded roll, the bang, and the
resulting lower altitude (SpaceShipOne had
been projected to reach 360,000 feet that
day), and missing the reentry point. He
vowed not to fly again until the problems
had been identified and corrected, and the
team considered another test flight before
starting the clock on the Ansari X-Prize,
a $10 million award for the first reusable

flight of SpaceShipOne on October 4, 2004,
reaching an altitude of 367,442 feet to claim
the X-Prize.
Melvill carried SpaceShipOne aloft
aboard White Knight on its final trip to
Washington’s Dulles International Airport,
where it was donated to the Smithsonian
Institution National Air and Space Museum;
the historic spacecraft now hangs in the
museum’s Milestones of Flight exhibition
on the Mall in downtown Washington, D.C.
Melvill saw it there recently and seems
genuinely surprised and gratified by its
place of honor. “It’s right next to the Spirit of
St. Louis, the Bell X–1, and the Wright Flyer,”
he said. “And these aren’t replicas. They’re
the real things.”
AOPA
EMAIL dave.hirschman@aopa.org
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AOPA Pilot Magazine - June 2013

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