SpaceShipOne is an experimental air-launched rocket-powered aircraft with sub-orbital spaceflight capability at speeds of up to 3,000 ft/s (2,000 mph) / 910 m/s (3,300 km/h) using a hybrid rocket motor.

Rutan has indicated that ideas about the project began as early as 1994 and the full-time development cycle time to the 2004 accomplishments was about three years.

A few days before that flight, the Mojave Air and Space Port was the first commercial spaceport licensed in the United States.

In June 2004, between flights 14P and 15P, a fairing was added, smoothly extending the fuselage shape to meet the flared end of the nozzle.

The aerodynamic control surfaces of SpaceShipOne are designed to operate in two distinct flight regimes, subsonic and supersonic.

One of the early test flights actually performed re-entry inverted, demonstrating the flexibility and inherent stability of Burt Rutan's "shuttlecock" design.

This feathered reentry mode is claimed to be inherently safer than the behavior at similar speeds of the Space Shuttle.

The Shuttle undergoes enormous aerodynamic stresses and must be precisely steered in order to remain in a stable glide.

This was deemed too risky, and the hybrid final design manages to incorporate the feathering capability into a craft that can land in a conventional manner.

The parts of the craft that experience the greatest heating, such as the leading edges of the wings, have about 6.5 kg (14 lb) of ablative thermal protection material applied.

The spacecraft cabin, designed to hold three humans, is shaped as a short cylinder, diameter 1.52 m (5 ft 0 in), with a pointed forward end.

The occupants do not wear spacesuits or breathing masks, because the cabin has been designed to maintain pressure in the face of faults: all windows and seals are doubled.

The cabin has sixteen round double-pane windows, positioned to provide a view of the horizon at all stages of flight.

The windows are small compared to the gaps between them, but there are sufficiently many for human occupants to patch together a moderately good view.

The FDD is particularly important to the pilot during the boost and coast phase in order to "turn the corner" and null rates caused by asymmetric thrust.

The tank is a short cylinder of diameter approximately 1.52 m (5 ft 0 in), with domed ends, and is the forwardmost part of the engine.

Incorporating the solid fuel (and hence the main part of the engine) and the ablative nozzle into this single bonded component minimizes the possible leak paths.

The combination of SpaceShipOne and White Knight can take off, land, and fly under jet power to high altitude.

If the burn was long enough then it will exceed an altitude of 100 km (62 mi), at which height the atmosphere presents no appreciable resistance, and the craft experiences free fall for a few minutes.

On October 4, it won the US$10 million Ansari X Prize, by reaching 100 kilometers in altitude twice in a two-week period with the equivalent of three people on board and with no more than ten percent of the non-fuel weight of the spacecraft replaced between flights.

[10] N is the prefix for US-registered aircraft; 328KF was chosen by Scaled Composites to stand for 328 kilofeet (about 100 kilometers), the officially designated edge of space.

On April 1, 2004, Scaled Composites received the first license for suborbital rocket flights to be issued by the US Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

They qualified to fly SpaceShipOne by training on the Tier One flight simulator and in White Knight and other Scaled Composites aircraft.

Later in the evening, Melvill gave a presentation at the Dayton Engineers Club, entitled "Some Experiments in Space Flight", in honor of Wilbur Wright's now-famous presentation to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1901 entitled "Some Experiments in Flight."

The White Knight then transported SpaceShipOne to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum to be put on display.

It was unveiled on Wednesday October 5, 2005 in the Milestones of Flight gallery and is now on display to the public in the main atrium with the Spirit of St. Louis, the Bell X-1, and the Apollo 11 command module Columbia.

A piece of SpaceShipOne's carbon fiber material was launched aboard the New Horizons mission to Pluto in 2006.

[17] A year after its appearance in the Oshkosh Airventure airshow, the Experimental Aircraft Association featured a full-scale replica of the spacecraft in a wing of its museum which housed other creations of Burt Rutan.

[18] Other full-scale replicas are at the William Thomas Terminal at Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield[19][20] the Mojave Spaceport's Legacy Park alongside the original Roton Atmospheric Test Vehicle,[citation needed] the Flying Heritage Collection at Paine Field in Everett,[21] and Google's Mountain View Campus.

[24][25] In August 2005, Virgin Galactic stated that if the upcoming suborbital service with SpaceShipTwo would be successful, the follow-up would be known as SpaceShipThree.