Business-class return to space, please (Image:NASA)

Gallery: Spaceplanes and scramjets: A 50-year history

ON A bright autumn morning five years ago, the space-flight community was turned on its head by a little teardrop-shaped spacecraft built in a small workshop in California’s Mojave desert. The successful flight of SpaceShipOne on 29 September 2004, the first of two flights en route to winning the $10 million Ansari X prize, seemed to usher in a new era of space travel – one in which space flight would be affordable, frequent and, perhaps most importantly, accessible to all.

SpaceShipOne was the first crewed spacecraft to be developed privately. Designed, built and flown on a budget of roughly $25 million, it was much cheaper than the multibillion-dollar US government-backed space shuttle. In its climb to just over 111 kilometres above the Earth, SpaceShipOne broke the world altitude record for a winged vehicle, set more than 40 years earlier by NASA’s X-15 rocket plane. It was also fully reusable, a feature long seen as an essential milestone on the path to a more accessible spacefaring future.

And yet, five years on, it is easy to regard SpaceShipOne as more anomaly than herald. After making two sub-orbital flights in two weeks, it never flew again: the craft now hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The Spaceship Company, a partnership between SpaceShipOne creator Burt Rutan and airline tycoon Richard Branson has yet to unveil the larger, passenger-ready SpaceShipTwo, although the company has revealed the carrier aircraft needed to launch it on its way to space. Most other commercial space-flight projects …