Five years ago on October 4, 2004, the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for commercial spaceflight was won when SpaceShipOne completed a pair of back-to-back flights to space. With pilot Brian Binnie at the controls, the prize-winning flight of SpaceShipOne made the front pages of newspapers worldwide, and marked a key milestone in the growth of commercial human spaceflight. Fittingly, October 4th also marks the launch of humanity’s first satellite into orbit, which occurred in 1957, beginning the Space Age.

“Since the X PRIZE flights occurred in 2004, we’ve seen a drumbeat of steady growth in the commercial spaceflight industry: the creation of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, hundreds of deposits put down for suborbital flights, the winning of NASA’s Lunar Lander Challenge prize money, over $1.2 billion of investment poured into this new industry, and now the Augustine Committee’s endorsement of commercial spaceflight,” stated John Gedmark, Executive Director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. “We are eagerly looking forward to many more exciting accomplishments to come.”

SpaceShipOne, which was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and developed by Burt Rutan’s company Scaled Composites, flew from the Mojave Spaceport in Mojave, California. By flying two piloted flights to 100 km within two weeks, the SpaceShipOne team successfully met the requirements to win the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE set up by the X PRIZE Foundation.

Gedmark added, “the X PRIZE flights drew thousands of spectators to the Mojave Spaceport to experience the excitement of commercial spaceflight, and the new generation of commercial vehicles coming online – both suborbital and orbital – will continue to raise the awareness of the wonders of spaceflight to the general public.”

The pilots who reached space aboard SpaceShipOne, Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, became the world’s first commercial astronauts and were awarded astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

SpaceShipOne, now retired from service, occupies a place of honor at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, alongside Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1.

Image credit: Scaled Composites