SpaceShipOne made a successful competitive flight on September 29, 2004, and so needed to make a second by October 13, 2004, in order to win.

Scaled Composites aimed to be able to fly three times within the two weeks in order to allow for a failed flight.

The date of the flight, October 4, 2004, was the 47th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth and the same day astronaut Gordon Cooper died.

The da Vinci Project, another X PRIZE contender, planned to make its first competitive flight on October 2, 2004, which might have caused a race to develop, affecting the scheduling.

[citation needed] The payload included: The same logos were carried as on flight 16P: All times are in PDT, which is seven hours behind UTC.

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, the Wright Flyer, and the Apollo 11 command module Columbia.

Entertainer and charity auctioneer Fred Northup, Jr. purchased the flight suit, and it is on loan and displayed at the museum's new Charles Simonyi Space Gallery.