A head-on view of the unusual-looking White Knight cockpit. Credit: Scaled Composites, LLC
Diamandis and Ansari converged at a point in time. A
point where this generation of innovators that grew up
during the Apollo era decided to make their dreams
of private spaceflight into a reality, rather than wait
another 40 years for their national governments to do the
same. For Rutan, this achievement brought him closer
to the dream of floating weightless in his own black sky.
Simplicity and elegance
Rutan’s approach with Scaled Composites was to
operate as a small custom build factory. Aerodynamic
designs resulted from a mix of computer simulations,
flight tests and even mounting aircraft parts on speeding
flat-bed trucks to take readings. Commonalities in
fabrication methods, materials and designs between
White Knight and SpaceShipOne gave synergised
simplicity to the creation of both vehicles. However,
it was SpaceShipOne’s ingenious design that was
a crucial foundation to the Tier One project.
The dangers of re-entry to spacecraft were well
known, requiring complex systems and high risk
manoeuvres to safely traverse the atmospheric
threshold. Rutan conceived a “feather” manoeuvre and
mechanism which essentially folded the spacecraft in
two at its suborbital apogee. This meant SpaceShipOne
could stably realign itself and fall vertically back to
Earth like a badminton shuttlecock would. Pilots called
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this a “care free” mode. As drag greatly increased
through the rapidly thickening atmosphere, there
were much lower structural and thermal stress build
ups over a shorter re-entry window. Even at Mach 3.25
SpaceShipOne would not get as hot as a returning
spacecraft would from orbit at conventional reentry angl