Private rocket plane aiming for space flight prize

As the world's first privately funded rocket plane is being readied for a run at making history by climbing out of earth's atmosphere, its builders are already eyeing their next goal: winning a $10 million prize for pioneering commercial space flight.
The SpaceShipOne project, backed by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft Corp, and aviation expert Burt Rutan, will send a rocket plane 100 kilometres, or 62 miles, into the air and back down again in California's Mojave Desert on June 21.
If all goes well, they are expected to announce their next goal after that flight, the Ansari X Prize, which is offering $10 million to the first team that sends three people, or an equivalent weight, on a manned space vehicle 100 kilometers above the earth and repeats the trip within two weeks.
Although Allen and Rutan's SpaceShipOne team are registered as entrants, they have so far avoided committing to making a bid for the X Prize.
The prize's co-founder, however, believes that a few teams are close enough to win the prize and that 2004 will be remembered as the year when commercial space flight was born. "I think we'll have an X Prize winner in the next three to four months," Peter Diamandis, president of the X Prize Foundation, told Reuters. "This is a pivotal year for space flight."
For some X Prize hopefuls - there are 26 teams registered - the $10 million pot will end up being only a fraction of the money spent in developing, building and flying the winning space craft.
Canada's Da Vinci Project is also aiming to capture the prize this summer by launching a rocket suspended from a helium balloon at an altitude of 80,000 feet (24,400 meters).
But many observers and experts have their bets on SpaceShipOne, which was designed by a team led by Burt Rutan, who designed the Voyager airplane that was flown non-stop around the world in 1986 by his brother Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager.
SpaceShipOne will be carried to an altitude of 50,000 feet (15,240 metres) by a larger carrier airplane, and then released to fire a rocket that will burn for 80 seconds to take it into the final stretch.
At its peak altitude, if all goes as planned, the test pilot of the world's first privately funded space craft will experience about three and a half minutes of weightlessness and see the black expanse of outer space.