Yeah.. One HELL of a scary ride, according to Melvill, but Fun Stuff. Go Burt.. Enjoy Biking for a while, Mike!
MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA -- There were tense times during the sky-blistering flight of SpaceShipOne here this morning.
The flight of the first private astronaut was not as perfect as it first appeared - a number of glitches occurred during
the flight, some potentially catastrophic.
At a post-landing press briefing, the 63-year old Melvill described a series of technical snags that haunted his record-
setting flight. Right after motor ignition, the pilot said the craft rolled 90 degrees to the left, then 90 degrees to the
right. "It has never ever done that before," he explained.
Melvill said he leveled out the rocketship, but then experienced trim problems during his climb outside the Earth´s
atmosphere. "As I came out of the atmosphere I no longer had any attitude control," Melvill told New Scientist and
other reporters. "If that had happened earlier, I would never have made it and you all would be looking sad right
now."
During SpaceShipOne´s climb, Melvill said he also heard a surprising bang, coming from the engine area
where a fairing holding the craft´s nozzle buckled. The team believes this was caused by aerodynamic stresses
crumpling a composite material fairing around the engine nozzle.
While an altitude of 360,000 feet was targeted, the rocket ship fell short of that mark, attaining 328,491 feet,
reported Burt Rutan, head of the Scaled Composites team that designed and built the vehicle.
"It was not a smooth flight from the standpoint of trajectory," Rutan reported at the press briefing. "This was not a
perfect flight." Rutan also said the anomaly Melvill experienced was "the most serious flight safety systems problem
that we´ve had in the entire program."
Back up hardware on SpaceShipOne worked and the craft made a beautiful landing, Rutan said. "Even though we
really didn´t go where we were planning to go today... makes me feel very good because I felt it´s important to put
those kind of backup systems in... and they worked," he added.
"The backup saved the day," Melvill noted.
SpaceShipOne was travelling "faster than an M-16 rifle bullet", Rutan said, about around 2400 km/h (1500 mph) or
mach 3.2. As it reentered the atmosphere, falling like a badminton shuttlecock almost straight down, the rushing air
sounded like a hurricane, said Melvill. "Coming down is frightening, because of that roaring sound," he said. "You can
really hear how that vehicle is being pounded."
Until the exact causes of the anomalies are understood, there will be no X-Prize attempt, Rutan said: "There's no way
we would fly again without knowing the cause and being sure we had fixed it."
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