MOJAVE, Calif. – Despite a wild roll that forced its pilot to ignore mission control momentarily, SpaceShipOne succeeded in the first of two flights required to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Air Force data show the ship reached a height of 337,500 feet, well above the 328,000 feet required to win the St. Louis-based Ansari prize. But as it reached the edge of the atmosphere, SpaceShipOne began a dangerous spin along its axis.

Engineers on the ground worried that the roll, which became apparent around 40 seconds into the engine blast, might threaten the ship.

At its most severe, the ship was rotating at a rate of one revolution every two seconds. “Shut down as soon as possible,” an engineer advised over the radio.

The pilot, Mike Melvill, hesitated before shutting off.

“He hung in for a few seconds to make sure” they’d made the altitude, said Burt Rutan, the ship’s designer. Then, 11 seconds before a computer would have automatically cut the power, Melvill turned off the motor.

“He wants to win the X Prize too,” explained Rutan in a news conference.

As the air thinned out, Melvill used a rudder to slow the spin. Then, once in the vacuum of space, he deployed air jets to calm the craft.

“You doing OK, Mike?” asked flight director Doug Shane over the radio.

“Doing OK,” responded Melvill.

Melvill, an award-winning test pilot, told reporters the flight was “comfortable easy.”

But his colleagues on the ground were frazzled. “He has nerves of steel,” Kevin Mickey, vice president of Rutan’s firm, Scaled Composites, told an Ansari Web broadcast. But Melvill gave credit to the ship’s ability to escape trouble. “That would be an accident if it happened on the space shuttle,” added Rutan.

Prize officials were confident that final results, due Thursday, would bear out the initial radar data. “One down, one to go,” said Peter Diamandis, the creator of the X Prize. The space shot marked the second visit to space for Melvill and SpaceShipOne.

Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the partnership between Rutan’s Scaled Composites and Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, has until 8:34 a.m. Oct. 14 to fly a second flight for the cash, though Rutan said he could be ready as soon as “Sunday or Monday.”

No other team has flown a manned test flight, and the Ansari money runs out at the end of the year.

Scaled Composites officials said the ship has a tendency to spin. “It’s possible I stepped on a rudder,” Melvill told reporters. Despite his impressive panache, Melvill said that his SpaceShipOne heroics could be over, declaring other pilots “younger (with) faster reflexes.”

The crowd numbered in the thousands, but was considerably smaller than the June 21 test flight, when roads into Mojave were jammed with families and recreational vehicles.

Full-size models of three X Prize rockets sat on display along the runway. Salesmen from Estes Rockets were on hand to sell model rockets based on race contestant vehicles.

In the silent early morning, a calm belied the drama that was to unfold. A pilot in a flannel shirt dozed on a sofa in the airport’s fliers’ lounge. Wind speeds along the ground approached the limits that Rutan had set to fly, but at 4 a.m. Scaled Composites Flight Director Doug Shane gave Mojave Airport General Manager Stu Witt the thumbs up. At 7:11 a.m. local time, with a reddish dawn gone from the desert, the gull-like White Knight took off with Melvill in SpaceShipOne strapped to its belly.

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About 100 people watched the takeoff via live Web cast in the center’s “Mission Control Room” at the St. Louis Science Center.

Several dozen wealthy businesspeople in St. Louis established the competition in 1996 as a way to spur tourism in space.

The ship’s hull carried stickers with logos of the New Spirit of St. Louis, a donor group, and the city’s Science Center.

“It once again puts St. Louis in the world spotlight,” said Regional Chamber and Growth Association President Richard Fleming.

The rocket also carried the logo of Virgin Galactic, the proposed space airline that Richard Branson introduced on Monday. The venture, which would offer flights to space for an estimated $190,000 per passenger, hopes to fly in 2007 using ships based on SpaceShipOne’s design.

Chesterfield-based Web developer Jack Bader, who attended the festivities in Mojave, called visiting space “my single lifetime goal.”

As White Knight worked its way spaceward over an hour in the morning, Ansari officials commemorated the St. Louis benefactors who first backed the idea eight years ago. After a tribute to early local supporter Al Kerth, a civic leader who committed suicide in 2002, the crowd of VIPs observed a moment of silence. “We lost a wonderful mentor,” said X Prize Foundation executive director Gregg Maryniak.

Staff involved with the project were each allowed to send a personal item to space. Rutan sent the ashes of his mother, who had followed his early exploits and died four years ago. “She flew today,” he said

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(c) 2004, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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