Spaceship inside
The overall mass of the fully fueled craft is 3,600 kg (7,900 lb), of which 2,700 kg (6,000 lb) is taken by the fully loaded rocket motor. There are large vertical tailbooms mounted on the end of each wing, with horizontal stabilizers protruding from the tailbooms. The craft has short, wide wings, with a span of 5 m (16 ft) and a chord of 3 m (9.8 ft). From front to back, it contains the crew cabin, oxidizer tank, fuel casing, and rocket nozzle. The main structure is of a graphite/ epoxy composite material. The fuselage is cigar-shaped, with an overall diameter of about 1.52 m (5 ft 0 in).
Accelerating a spacecraft to orbital speed requires more than 60 times as much energy as accelerating it to Mach 3. The achievements of SpaceShipOne are more comparable to those of the X-15 than to those of orbiting spacecraft like the Space Shuttle. The overall project name was " Tier One" which has evolved into Tier 1b with a goal of taking a successor ship's first passengers into space. A few hours after that flight, Melvill became the first licensed U.S.
A few days before that flight, the Mojave Air and Space Port was the first commercial spaceport licensed in the United States. SpaceShipOne's first official spaceflight, known as flight 15P, was piloted by Mike Melvill. The vehicle first achieved supersonic flight on December 17, 2003, which was also the one-hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers' historic first powered flight. 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. Allen provided the funding of approximately US$25 million. Both craft were developed and flown by Mojave Aerospace Ventures, which was a joint venture between Paul Allen and Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan's aviation company. Its mother ship was named " White Knight". That same year, it won the US$10 million Ansari X Prize and was immediately retired from active service. SpaceShipOne completed the first crewed private spaceflight in 2004. The design features a unique " feathering" atmospheric reentry system where the rear half of the wing and the twin tail booms folds 70 degrees upward along a hinge running the length of the wing this increases drag while retaining stability. SpaceShipOne is an experimental air-launched rocket-powered aircraft with sub-orbital spaceflight capability at speeds of up to 3,000 ft/s (900 m/s), using a hybrid rocket motor.