of the crowd, and celebratory flybys when the test succeeded. The flight was not only a technical success but also a popular success, stimulating intense public interest in spaceflight. Future During an interview in the documentary Black Sky: The Race For Space, Rutan stated that Tier One will cover suborbital flights, Tier Two will cover orbital flights, and Tier Three will cover flights beyond Earth's orbit (including flights to the moon and other planets). In the same documentary he displayed designs for an orbital craft based on SpaceShipOne, which had a rocket roughly twice SpaceShipOne's length mounted to the ship's rear. Commercial aspects The stated objective of the Tier One program is to demonstrate suborbital human spaceflight operations at low cost. Before Burt Rutan began considering this project, there were three major barriers to the goal of affordable suborbital spaceflight: the dangers and costs of liquid propulsion fuels (they explode); the uncontrollable nature of solid fuel rocket motors (can not be turned off); the difficulties in getting back without burning up in the atmosphere. Tier One itself is not intended to carry paying passengers, and US Government permits would be required if it did intend to do so. It is a technology testbed, and it is expressly intended that the technology developed in the program will later be used in commercial spaceflights. To that end, Allen and Rutan created a company, Mojave Aerospace Ventures, which owns the project's intellectual property and manages all commercial exploitation of it. Scaled Composites initially expressed a hope that by about 2013 it would be possible for members of the public to experience a suborbital flight for about the price of a luxury cruise. On September 25, 2004, a deal was struck with Virgin Galactic to develop the Virgin SpaceShip based on a scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne. These spacecraft are to be built by The Spaceship Company. References External links Tier One home page at Scaled Composites' website The Space Review article "Prelude to history?" featuring Rutan quote about Model 346 The Space Review article "The future starts here" Aerospace America article "SpaceShipOne: Riding a White Knight to Space", with several technical details SPACE.com article "SpaceShipOne Rocket Engine Gets an Upgrade" The Register article "Virgin to offer space flights" BBC News article "'No experiments' for SpaceShipOne" Why SpaceShipOne Never Did, Never Will, And None Of Its Direct Descendants Ever Will, Orbit The Earth (by Karen