Flight 15P of
SpaceShipOne (X0) was the first privately funded
human spaceflight. It took place on June 21, 2004. It was the fourth powered test flight of the
Tier One program, the previous three test flights having reached much lower altitudes. The flight carried only its
pilot,
Mike Melvill, who thus became the first non-governmental
astronaut.
This flight was a full-altitude test. SpaceShipOne was dropped from its carrier aircraft, White Knight, at 14:50 UTC (7:50am PDT), at an altitude of 47,000 feet (14,000 m), and fired its on-board rocket for 76 seconds. It reached a peak altitude of 328,491 feet (100,124 m), becoming the first commercial manned spacecraft to cross the Kármán line. It landed safely at Mojave Air and Space Port, California, 15:14 UTC (8:14am PDT).
Flight 15P was a test flight to prepare Scaled Composites to compete for the Ansari X Prize, the prize for the first non-governmental reusable manned spacecraft. Scaled Composites would win the Ansari X Prize in October 2004 after two more successful flights.
Robert Laurel "Bob" Crippen (born September 11, 1937), (
Capt,
USN, Ret.), is a retired
American naval officer and
aviator,
test pilot,
aerospace engineer, and former
astronaut for the
United States Department of Defense and for
NASA.
An aviator with the U.S. Navy, Crippen was originally chosen to the U.S. Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, a project involving a military space station, in 1966. When that project was canceled in 1969, Crippen was transferred to NASA. He was selected as pilot of the first Space Shuttle mission, STS-1, along with commander John Young, which he flew on April 12-14, 1981, on the orbiter Columbia.
Crippen would likewise become the first Shuttle pilot to be promoted to commander, leading the STS-7 mission on orbiter Challenger in June 1983. He would command two other missions (STS-41-C and STS-41-G) in 1984. He was training for another mission when the Challenger disaster occurred, and was re-assigned as Deputy Director of Kennedy Space Center in 1987.
Crippen would serve as the Director of Kennedy Space Center from January 1992 until January 1995, when he left NASA. He would hold executive positions at Lockheed Martin and Thiokol before retiring in 2001.
