Let loose from its White Knight mothership, the rocket engine propelling the experimental suborbital SpaceShipOne vehicle roared to life, skillfully controlled by test pilot Mike Melvill.

Twenty years ago, all of that changed, as a new spaceflight era was sparked by the launch of SpaceShipOne, the first private sub-orbital spacecraft ever. Today, non-government space launches and ...

In 2004, SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded rocket to reach the edge of space, flew to an altitude above 62 miles over the California desert. In 2006, WikiLeaks.org was created by Julian ...

Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity and its mothership (left) are modeled after the SpaceShipOne launch system (right) that was built with Seattle billionaire Paul Allen’s backing. (Photos by Virgin ...

SpaceShipOne and the Ansari X Prize Instead of using traditional rockets that take off from the ground, Virgin Galactic has heavily invested in air-launched spaceplanes that are carried aloft by a ...

Instead, we drove to Mojave to see the launch of the first private manned space flight, SpaceShipOne. We craned our necks to watch the tiny craft detach from its mothership and zoom up to a record ...

He, too, had been worried about breaking up on reëntry, but, as he now explained to Allen, he had come up with an engineering solution that involved the vehicle, which he called SpaceShipOne ...

That quest reached its climax in 2004, when the Allen-backed SpaceShipOne rocket plane made multiple flights into outer space and won the prize. But the seeds were sown in the 1990s when Diamandis ...

RutanRC, a company formed to develop, manufacture and distribute innovative RC (radio controlled) model aircraft, announced today its launch of a Kickstarter campaign to fund the tooling ...

Count the Ansari X-Prize-winning test pilot of SpaceShipOne, Brian Binnie, among the critics of SpaceShipTwo. Six days before SpaceShipTwo broke-up in-flight and crashed, killing Scaled Composites ...

Few people thought about going to space as tourists several years ago but the age of commercial spaceflight started to take off when SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in Oct. 4 ...