MOJAVE, California, Oct 4 (AFP) - Ushering in an era of commercial space travel, a private manned rocketship blasted into space for the second time in five days Monday, snatching a 10-million-dollar prize aimed at spurring galactic tourism.
In a flawless mission, SpaceShipOne, piloted by former US navy test pilot Brian Binnie, smashed the sub-orbital flight altitude record, reaching 368,000 feet (70 miles/114 kilometers) and entering the fringes of space, according to preliminary radar readings.
"Today we made history," said Peter Diamandis, president of the Ansari X Prize Foundation, which offered the prize in a bid to encourage space tourism, as thousands cheered the space craft back to Earth.
"Today the winners are the people of Earth," he said as SpaceShipOne was towed towards a cheering crowd after the 90 minute space foray over California's Mojave desert. "Today we go to the stars."
"We blew the X-15 away," Diamandis added in a reference to SpaceShipOne breaking the record for sub-orbital flight set by the X-15 rocket plane more than 40 years ago.
The X-15, jointly developed by NASA and the US military, set an altitude record of 354,200 feet (67 miles/108 kilometers) on August 22, 1963.
As SpaceShipOne touched down, its designer, aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, stood alongside British tycoon Richard Branson and Diamandis on the Mojave airport tarmac leaping for joy and cheering.
Branson, owner of the Virgin Atlantic airline, last week announced plans to join the private space race using a craft based on SpaceShipOne, offering passengers space jaunts for about 200,000 dollars a trip.
He described Monday's flight as a "magnificent achievement" and said he was looking forward to receiving the first spacecraft for his Virgin Galactic spaceline from Rutan by 2007.
To win the X Prize, the same reusable manned spacecraft needed to make two journeys into space within two weeks while carrying the equivalent weight of two passengers.
Rutan was jubiliant over winning the X Prize and achieving his goal of smashing the X-15 record by around 13,000 feet (2.5 miles/4.0 kilometers).
Long an outspoken adversary of the mainstream space industry and NASA, Rutan cocked a victorious snoot at his rivals, deriding what he called the "Boeings, the Lockheeds, the naysayers in Houston."
"If they got a look at how this flight was run and how we developed the capabilities of this ship and its safety, I think they would look at each other right now and say 'We're screwed,'" he said.
"I have a hell of lot bigger goal than they do," he said vowing to develop a commercial spacecraft for Branson that would be "at least 100 times safer than anything that is ever flown into space."
Binnie, the 51-year-old pilot, described the flight that earned him his astronaut's wings as a "dream come true."
"I'm riding on the coattails of some giants here," he said referring to Rutan and the world's only other private astronaut, Mike Melvill, who flew SpaceShipOne on a successful test flight on June 21 and on the first leg of its X Prize bid here on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, the craft, which was funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, rolled dozens of times at speeds of around 2,700 kilometers per hour (1,687 mph), corkscrewing through the sky.
But there were no problems this time and Binnie managed to ignite the rocket engine for a total of 84 seconds, five seconds more than Melvill on Wednesday.
Among the VIPs here was the head of the US Federal Aviation Administration, Marion Blakey, who is responsible for regulating the spaceship. "It's a historic thing, the beginning of personal transportation into space," she said.
A galaxy of celebrities also turned up, including "Star Trek" actor William Shatner, music mogul Quincy Jones, jazz musician Herbie Hancock and Kiss rock group singer Gene Simmons.
On Monday, one of SpaceShipOne's sponsors, softdrink maker 7 UP, announced it would offer consumers a prize of the first free tickets to space in a competition that has yet to be finalised.
Rutan selected October 4 to coincide with the 47th anniversary of the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union's first satellite, Sputnik I, which sparked the original space race between Moscow and Washington.
Organisers who proposed the competition hope it will spawn an age of space travel rivalling the dawn of commercial air transport in the late 1920s.
The X Prize, funded by private donors, was established in 1996 and modelled on the 25,000-dollar Orteig prize that aviator Charles Lindbergh won when he became the first solo pilot to cross the Atlantic in 1927.