Quotes of the Day

When the first American flew into space in 1961, Burt Rutan was a 17-year-old college freshman. Listening to news of Alan Shepard's groundbreaking suborbital flight on the radio, Rutan was euphoric. He too hoped to go into space one day—and was disappointed that a cautious NASA had allowed the Soviets to beat the U.S. to the prize.

"We could have had the first man in space," Rutan recalls, "and we sent a monkey instead."

The possibilities back then seemed limitless, and it was easy for Rutan's generation to imagine they would all get to taste zero-gravity one day. It didn't work out that way. After NASA reached the moon in 1969, its focus shifted to unmanned probes, orbital experiments and a costly low-orbit shuttle system. The imagined future of Everyman as astronaut evaporated. This year, more than four decades after Shepard's flight, only two Americans have made the jump into space from U.S. soil—both launched not by NASA but by Rutan's tiny company, known for build-your-own-airplane kits.

Rutan personally designed their craft, SpaceShipOne, a vehicle as improbable as it is revolutionary. The size of a small biplane, SpaceShipOne is a shell of woven graphite glued onto a rocket motor that runs on laughing gas and rubber. The nose is punctuated by portholes, like an ocean liner. Inside, the critical instrument is a Ping-Pong ball decorated with a smiley face and attached to the cabin with a piece of string, which goes slack when the pilot reaches the zero-gravity of suborbital space.

Despite its Flash Gordon looks and unorthodox design, SpaceShipOne was able to more than match Shepard's trailblazing journey. In June it became the first privately funded spacecraft. In October it clinched the $10 million Ansari X Prize as the first such craft to travel to space twice in two weeks. Thanks to the backing of two starry-eyed billionaires, SpaceShipOne is set to become the first in a new line of space-tourism craft coming in 2007. "It's a spaceship that fits in your two-car garage, and you can take it to space every other day," says X Prize founder Peter Diamandis. "That's pretty cool."

We agree. For solving the problems of suborbital flight and re-entry with ingenious design, for boldly going where NASA now fears to tread and returning without a scratch, but most of all for reigniting the moon-shot-era dream of zero-gravity for everyone, SpaceShipOne is TIME's Coolest Invention of 2004.

Success for Rutan's maverick creation was by no means assured. There were 24 teams competing for the X Prize purse, which was set to expire at the end of this year. Modeled on the Orteig Prize—which motivated Charles Lindbergh's celebrated transatlantic flight in 1927—the X Prize was created to fuel a competition in space liners, just as its predecessor inspired the early airlines. Imaginations ran wild. The Canadian Da Vinci Project wanted to launch its rocket from 80,000 ft. after lifting it there with a reusable helium balloon.

John Carmack, creator of the Doom video games, intended to blast his wife into suborbital space with a new kind of engine that runs on alcohol. (Carmack's prototype crashed; Da Vinci's effort was hampered by missing parts.) And getting a human into space is the easy part; it's getting them back that causes the real trouble. The friction of the atmosphere, combined with Earth's gravitational pull, creates an intense and deadly heat. The space shuttle solved this problem with millions of dollars' worth of tiles on its underbelly (although, as a shocked world saw last year, that system is not foolproof).

Rutan woke up one morning six years ago at his desert home in Mojave, Calif., with a heat-beating idea no one had considered before: Why not build a space plane with wings that hinge up at its highest altitude, creating a feathering effect so it floats gently back to Earth like a shuttlecock in a game of badminton? Rutan quickly sketched out his idea and started showing it around.

The reception was muted. Rutan was widely respected in the experimental-plane-building industry, having designed Voyager, the first aircraft to make it around the world nonstop without refueling, which his brother Dick helped fly into the record books in 1986. But the design for SpaceShipOne inspired near universal derision. "When I first saw it, I thought he'd lost his mind," says Mike Melvill, Rutan's oldest employee, longtime friend and faithful test pilot.

To Rutan, the raised eyebrows proved he was on the right track. "If you don't have a consensus that it's nonsense," says Rutan, "you don't have a breakthrough." He showed the design to Paul Allen, the reclusive, science-fiction-loving co-founder of Microsoft. "After a few minutes with Burt," says Allen, "you realize just how innovative he is." Allen, the fifth richest guy on the planet, agreed to fund Rutan's X Prize venture.

SpaceShipOne's lift-off is inventive too. The vehicle is carried aloft tethered to the belly of a futuristic cargo plane dubbed White Knight, which takes off effortlessly and then climbs in circles of ever increasing altitude for an hour. Just when you think White Knight has disappeared from sight, SpaceShipOne separates and ignites its engine, which is fueled by nitrous oxide and rubber, and a plume of white smoke shoots straight up into the sky. Unlike the computer-driven shuttle, SpaceShipOne is controlled by an old-fashioned mechanical stick and rudder. That makes the altitude climb hair-raising for the pilot. "It's going faster than a speeding bullet," says Melvill, who piloted the vehicle's first flight, "and you're trying to control it by hand."

But beginning around 158,000 ft., well before SpaceShipOne's apogee, where the sky goes black and you can see the curvature of the earth, Melvill and fellow test pilot Brian Binnie each had a good four minutes of weightlessness with nothing to do. Both took digital-camera snapshots through the portholes. Melvill scattered a handful of M&M's and watched them float. Binnie took out a tiny model of SpaceShipOne and flew it around the cabin. Then that crazy hinge raises the wings, Earth's gravity kicks in, and SpaceShipOne becomes a glider. "It's like falling into a feather bed," says Melvill.

Rutan—who took to calling NASA "the other space agency" during the X Prize competition—firmly believes the future belongs to commercial space flight. Concerned that SpaceShipOne was destined for nothing more than the National Air and Space Museum, he and Allen enlisted another aeronautics enthusiast and billionaire, Virgin's Richard Branson. Over dinner in Mojave, they sketched out a vision of suborbital and orbital space tourism over the next 75 years. Branson was instantly won over. He ordered five larger versions of SpaceShipOne with seats for five passengers and a pilot.

If Rutan's firm, Scaled Composites, delivers on time, Virgin Galactic will be up and running in 2007. Rutan knows that to sell tickets, he must make flights "at least a hundred times" safer than space travel has been so far. After all, 18 of the 430 humans who have flown into space died there. "You can't have an airline that kills 4% of its passengers," says Rutan.

Not that prospective passengers seem worried. Via the Virgin Galactic website, Branson already has a waiting list of more than 7,000 people who are apparently willing to pay the $190,000 price for a suborbital flight—more than enough to cover Virgin's investment. Among the pledged passengers are former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro and actor William Shatner. As more people sign on, says Branson, Virgin will be able to lower the price: "This isn't just a pipe dream. We will get this to the point where thousands of people can go into space." He and Rutan plan to be aboard the first Virgin Galactic flight. A mere 46 years after Alan Shepard, if all goes according to plan, Rutan will finally, personally, get to experience his zero-gravity dream.

• CHRIS TAYLOR