SpaceShipOne Retires To Museum

[zavvy]

<b>SpaceShipOne Retires To Museum </b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />The record-setting SpaceShipOne is due to arrive in its final resting place, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington DC. <br /><br />The suborbital rocket plane, designed by Burt Rutan and his Scaled Composites team, made two piloted trips into space to snag the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. <br /><br />SpaceShipOne is to be displayed in the museum's Milestones of Flight Gallery, according to a NASM spokesman. <br /><br />The gallery exhibits some of the major firsts in aviation and space history. <br /><br />Among other aviation "stars", SpaceShipOne will keep company with the Wright Brothers' 1903 Flyer and the Apollo 11 command module "Columbia", which carried the first man to the Moon. <br /><br />Voyager, another Burt Rutan design, which completed the first non-stop non-refuel flight around the world, hangs in the south lobby of NASM. <br /><br />SpaceShipOne rocketed into history on October 4, 2004, becoming the first privately owned spacecraft to exceed an altitude of 328,000 feet (100km) twice within the space of a 14-day period, thus claiming the much coveted Ansari X-Prize. <br /><br />No specific date has been set for the craft to go on public display at the museum, but it will be some time this year, NASM has said. <br /><br />