Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Mike Melvill, the first commercial astronaut, and the first person to travel into space aboard a privately funded spacecraft.
Image credit: Courtesy photograph

SpaceShipOne was the experimental spaceplane developed by Scaled Composites in Mojave, California.

Melvill’s 2004 flight (September 29) along with the late Brian Binnie in SpaceshipOne (October 4, 2004) enabled the project team run by noted aerospace designer, Burt Rutan, to win the Ansari X Prize of $10 million.

Melvill made his second spaceflight in SpaceShipOne, completing the first of the required two flights to qualify for the Ansari X-Prize competition meant to incentivize the creation of reliable, reusable, privately funded spaceflight.

“Very sad — it seems impossible that there are still Apollo astronauts alive, while my two SpaceShipOne Astronauts are now gone,” Rutan told Inside Outer Space.