SpaceShipOne was carried from the ground by its mothership, known as White Knight One, to an altitude of approximately 45,000 feet before being dropped. After a brief period of gliding and descending away from White Knight One, SpaceShipOne ignited its engine — a hybrid rocket engine that used both solid and liquid fuels — and ascended at an angle of 65 degrees from the ground.
SpaceShipOne ultimately could reach a speed of Mach 3.5 and, once the engine was cut off, would continue to ascend above 62 miles (100 kilometers) — the internationally recognized boundary of space, also known as the Karman Line. While coasting, its occupants would experience a brief period of weightlessness before the craft’s parabolic course brought it back down to the upper layers of the atmosphere.
At the apogee of its course, SpaceShipOne raised its wing to allow for a more controlled reentry. After entering the atmosphere, it lowered its wing and glided to a controlled landing on a runway. SpaceShipOne claimed the Ansari X Prize in 2004 and currently hangs in the “Milestones of Flight” gallery at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
SpaceShipTwo: triumph and tragedy
Just days before SpaceShipOne’s successful X Prize campaign, Richard Branson announced the formation of Virgin Galactic. The spaceline would license Scaled Composites’ technology and commission it to build a second-generation spacecraft: SpaceShipTwo.
Designed to carry a crew of eight (two pilots and six passengers), SpaceShipTwo has a very similar flight profile to that of SpaceShipOne. It’s carried from the ground by its mothership, White Knight Two, and, after separating and firing its engine, is designed to reach an altitude of 68 miles. Both SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two are roughly double the size of their predecessors.
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