At 8:15 a.m. Pacific time, a mothership aircraft named White Knight released a stubby-winged spacecraft at 47,000 feet. Pilot Brian Binnie ignited a hybrid rocket motor for 15 seconds. SpaceShipOne accelerated to Mach 1.2, climbing to over 67,800 feet. The flight lasted 18 minutes. It landed on the same runway from which it had been carried aloft.
The project was bankrolled by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and designed by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites. Its objective was not a government contract but the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award for the first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. This flight proved the vehicle’s propulsion and supersonic handling.
Public attention often focuses on the later, space-winning flights. The December 17 supersonic test was the essential, unglamorous engineering hurdle. It demonstrated that a small, lightweight hybrid rocket—using nitrous oxide and rubber—could be controlled safely by a single pilot outside the atmosphere of a military or NASA program.
The flight’s success directly enabled the winning of the X Prize ten months later. It provided the foundational data and confidence for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which licensed the technology. The event shifted the paradigm of human spaceflight from an exclusively state-sponsored endeavor to a field open to private capital and iterative, risk-tolerant design.