Sentences with phrase «reach suborbital space»

In 2004, the aircraft and rocket maker Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, won the Ansari X prize for SpaceShipOne, the first commercial spacecraft to reach suborbital space.

Not exact matches

For years Chakrabarti and his colleagues have been pursuing a middle way between the laboratory and orbit, using NASA funding to conduct low - cost test flights of these advanced optics technologies with small suborbital rockets and high - altitude balloons that reach the edge of outer space.

(Suborbital means the vehicle can fly only to a lower altitude than is necessary to start orbiting the Earth — it would have to travel higher, and faster, to reach altitudes achieved by orbiting satellites or the International Space Station, for example.)

Maverick aircraft designer Burt Rutan captured the Ansari X Prize in 2004 by lofting his manned, reusable rocket plane SpaceShipOne into space, but that was a suborbital flight requiring about 2 percent of the energy needed to reach and maintain orbit.