Flight 13P of

SpaceShipOne 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, 3240 km/h), using a hybrid rocket motor. The design features a unique "feathering" a ...

was its second powered flight, which occurred on April 8, 2004. The

pilot An aircraft pilot or aviator is a person who controls the flight of an aircraft by operating its directional flight controls. Some other aircrew members, such as navigators or flight engineers, are also considered aviators, because they a ...

was

Peter Siebold Peter Siebold (born 1971) is a member of the Scaled Composites astronaut team. He is their Director of Flight Operations, and was one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo, the experimental spaceplanes developed by the company. On ...

Details

SpaceShipOne was released from

White Knight A white knight is a mythological figure and literary stock character. They are portrayed alongside a black knight as diametric opposites. A white knight usually represents a heroic warrior fighting against evil, with the role in medieval literatu ...

at an altitude of 45,600 ft (13,900 m). Ignition was delayed by about two minutes to evaluate a shock-induced stall buffet. The rocket was lit at an altitude of 38,300 feet (11.7 km) for a 40-second burn. At burn-out, the

Mach number Mach number (M or Ma) (; ) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound. It is named after the Moravian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. : \mathrm = \frac ...

was 1.6. The craft coasted to an

apogee An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion. General description There are two apsides in any ellip ...

altitude of 105,000 feet (32.0 km). During reentry the craft attained Mach 0.9. The craft switched to glider configuration at 40,000 feet (12.2 km). The craft returned to the

Mojave Airport The Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field is in Mojave, California, United States, at an elevation of . It is the first facility to be licensed in the United States for horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft, being certified as a spa ...

and landed safely.

External links

SPACE.com article

{{Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne Scaled Composites Tier One program 2004 in spaceflight