SpaceShipOne made the first private crewed spaceflight in 2004

SpaceShipOne made the first privately funded crewed spaceflight on June 21, 2004, when pilot Mike Melvill flew it to about 100 kilometers (62 miles) above Mojave, California, just past the Kármán line, a widely used boundary of space. Until then, every human spaceflight had been run by a government.

Designed by Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites and paid for by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the craft was dropped from the White Knight carrier plane at about 40,000 feet, fired its rocket motor, and coasted up on a suborbital arc. The flight lasted 24 minutes, with about three minutes of weightlessness. Rutan later said the team worked in secret for two of the program’s three and a half years, and that “the government had no idea that we were doing a manned space program.”

The June flight is often mistaken for the prize-winner. It was not. The $10 million Ansari X Prize required a privately funded, reusable craft able to carry three people to 100 km, flown twice within two weeks.

The prize and what followed

• 1996: the prize is launched; XPRIZE credits it with driving more than $100 million in research and development.
• June 21, 2004: Melvill, 100 km, the first private spaceflight.
• September 29, 2004: Melvill, 102 km, the first qualifying flight.
• October 4, 2004: Brian Binnie, 112 km, winning the prize.
• 2023: SpaceShipOne’s descendant, built on technology licensed by Virgin Galactic, begins commercial service.

What followed flew lower. That descendant carries passengers to about 85 kilometers (52 miles), well short of the 100 km line its predecessor crossed. SpaceShipOne itself now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.