US awards first suborbital aircraft license

WASHINGTON - For the first time the government has cleared a commercial aviator to fly to the edge of Earth's orbit in an experimental aircraft that could become the model for taking tourists into space, regulators said on Wednesday.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued the license for a commercially sponsored suborbital manned flight to Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites group of Mojave, California.

Scaled Composites is competing in a privately run, $10 million contest to send a reusable craft carrying three people on a suborbital round-trip.

The flight would have to be repeated within two weeks to win the X Prize.

The government license, issued on April 1, is good for one year.

Enterprising companies have taken reservations for space tourism for years, but regulatory hurdles and the lack of affordable technology have blocked commercial travel.

Rutan flies SpaceShipOne, a rocket-powered winged craft designed to be launched at 50,000 feet from a plane. It has completed nearly a dozen preliminary test flights and broke the sound barrier last year. Rutan's craft will land like a plane.

Twenty-seven contestants representing seven countries have already registered for the X Prize contest, modeled on the $25,000 Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh claimed by flying solo from New York to Paris in 1927.

The US government, through NASA, has been sending astronauts into space for four decades.


- REUTERS