If it works, SpaceShipOne, a three-seat mini-shuttle, will break with 43 years of state-funded missions and offer customers a brief space whirl for about the price of a flight on Concorde. The craft has yet to take to the air, but its mothership, White Knight, has been test-flown in secret for the past nine months over the Mojave Desert in California.

SpaceShipOne will start its mission with a climb to 50,000ft under the twin- engined White Knight. The SpaceShipOne pilot will then fire the rocket engine, fuelled by a mix of nitrous oxide and rubber, and climb at 2,500mph into the blackness of space to an altitude of just over 60 miles.

In sub-orbit beyond all but a whiff of atmosphere, passengers will be treated to the full sensation of space flight. After arcing weightless at the top of its trajectory, the ship will extend its wings and tail and glide back to the runway that it left 90 minutes earlier.

With recent memories of the Columbia shuttle disaster and delays to the multibillion-dollar International Space Station, this everyman’s spaceship sounds like the stuff of a nutty inventor, but it is being treated with respect by Nasa and rivals in the civilian space race because its progenitor is Burt Rutan, a star in the world of aircraft design.

Mr Rutan, 59, whose innovations include Voyager, the only private aircraft to fly around the world without refuelling, shocked the competition when he showed off his craft at Mojave. Developed in secret with an estimated $20 million (£12.4 million) of finance, the project is partly aimed at winning the “X-Prize”. On offer since 1996, the $10 million prize will go to the first privately funded manned spacecraft that takes three people up 100 kilometres (62.5 miles) on two flights within two weeks. More than 20 teams in the United States and Canada are in the race for this successor to the Orteig Prize for flying the Atlantic. That trophy was won in 1927 by Charles Lindbergh.

Peter Diamandis, the prize chairman, said that the Rutan project “has not only the potential to win the prize, but to jump-start an entire industry. This could create more astronauts in one year than have been created in the last 40 years.”

Jean-Loup Chrétien, a French astronaut who has flown on both American and Russian space missions, noted yesterday that Mr Rutan had an unbroken success record. “He has never gone into any of his ventures lightly and will not want to tarnish his reputation with a failure,” he said.

The designer, who specialises in lightweight composite structures, has built commercial aircraft, as well as rockets, missiles and experimental aircraft for Nasa and the US military. Mr Rutan said that his programme for affordable space flight was aimed at putting the adventure back into a business that had been dragged down by bureaucracy.

“We seem to be making acronyms for engineering welfare, rather than having the courage to actually fly something,” he said. “If we are successful, our programme will mark the beginning of a renaissance for manned space flight. This might even be similar to that wonderful time between 1908 and 1912 when the world went from a total of ten aeroplane pilots to hundreds of aeroplane types and thousands of pilots.”

The Rutan company, Scaled Composites, says that it has a full-blown working space programme, complete with trainee astronauts, simulators and launch vehicle. It aims to succeed, where huge state-financed programmes have failed, by going back to basics. It is essentially devising a lightweight, high-tech version of the first American space programme.

Celebrated in Tom Wolfe’s novel and film, The Right Stuff, the programme sent air-launched piloted rocket planes from the Mojave into sub-orbit in 1959.

Mr Rutan’s team insists that the science is simpler than for full orbital flight because re- entry is much less tricky. The key to what Mr Rutan calls his “leisurely” return will be the way in which SpaceShipOne extends its wings to slow to a gentle glide.

Scaled Composites will not give a date for the first flight, but insiders say it is aiming for the centenary of the world’s first powered flight, by the Wright Brothers, next December. The company will not develop SpaceShipOne commercially, but aims to sell the technology to a big aerospace company.

It estimates that the cost of a seat would be a few thousand dollars — a fraction of the $20 million paid by the two civilians who have flown on Russian space flights.

Flights of fancy for space trippers

• The multimillionaire American businessman Dennis Tito became the first space tourist when he flew to the International Space Station aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2001
• In April 2002 Mark Shuttleworth, a South African entrepreneur, secured a seat aboard the Soyuz taxi service to the ISS
• Cosmopolis XXI Aerospace System (C21), a next-generation spacecraft designed for space-tourist flights, was unveiled earlier this year by Russia

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