Masten Space Systems, based at the Mojave Spaceport in California, demonstrated yesterday the ability to successfully relight the engine of a VTVL (vertical-takeoff vertical-landing) vehicle in midair. This marks the first-ever midair relight for any VTVL rocket-powered vehicle.

“We’re extremely excited and very proud to announce that we now have in-air re-light capability,” stated CEO David Masten in a press release issued by Masten Space Systems. “The ability to turn off our engine, re-ignite it in flight, successfully regain control and land was the next big milestone as we expand our flight envelope to include high altitude flights. Each milestone we hit makes the path to space much clearer.” More information from Masten is available at http://masten-space.com/blog/?p=532 .

In 2009, Masten Space Systems won the $1 million top prize in Level 2 of the NASA Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, by flying a vehicle that could hover for 180 seconds while translating between two pads, and repeating the feat within about 2 hours. Masten Space Systems is developing a series of VTVL vehicles to achieve increasingly high altitudes and achieve low-cost, rapid-turnaround access to the space environment.

Masten’s success comes days after the White House spotlighted NASA’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research Program (CRuSR), which will invest $15 million per year to enable flights of science, research, and educational payloads aboard commercial suborbital vehicles being developed by Masten Space Systems and other companies such as Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace.

In a White House blog post on Tuesday, Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), stated, “Thanks in large part to the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a new generation of commercial suborbital spacecraft has been under development by entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, David Masten, and Jeff Greason. CRuSR—one of several innovative priorities for NASA’s new Chief Technology Officer, Bobby Braun—is building on that momentum. Starting next year, NASA will invest $15 million per year to support a wide range of technology demonstrations, educational experiments, and science payloads on these new vehicles.” The White House OSTP blog post can be found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/25/nasa-nurtures-new-ideas-near-orbit .

Five years ago on October 4, 2004, the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for commercial spaceflight was won when SpaceShipOne completed a pair of back-to-back flights to space. With pilot Brian Binnie at the controls, the prize-winning flight of SpaceShipOne made the front pages of newspapers worldwide, and marked a key milestone in the growth of commercial human spaceflight. Fittingly, October 4th also marks the launch of humanity’s first satellite into orbit, which occurred in 1957, beginning the Space Age.

“Since the X PRIZE flights occurred in 2004, we’ve seen a drumbeat of steady growth in the commercial spaceflight industry: the creation of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, hundreds of deposits put down for suborbital flights, the winning of NASA’s Lunar Lander Challenge prize money, over $1.2 billion of investment poured into this new industry, and now the Augustine Committee’s endorsement of commercial spaceflight,” stated John Gedmark, Executive Director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. “We are eagerly looking forward to many more exciting accomplishments to come.”

SpaceShipOne, which was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and developed by Burt Rutan’s company Scaled Composites, flew from the Mojave Spaceport in Mojave, California. By flying two piloted flights to 100 km within two weeks, the SpaceShipOne team successfully met the requirements to win the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE set up by the X PRIZE Foundation.

Gedmark added, “the X PRIZE flights drew thousands of spectators to the Mojave Spaceport to experience the excitement of commercial spaceflight, and the new generation of commercial vehicles coming online – both suborbital and orbital – will continue to raise the awareness of the wonders of spaceflight to the general public.”

The pilots who reached space aboard SpaceShipOne, Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, became the world’s first commercial astronauts and were awarded astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

SpaceShipOne, now retired from service, occupies a place of honor at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, alongside Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1.

Image credit: Scaled Composites

Press releases from before June 2009 can be found at the “Press Releases” section of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation website, under the “News” menu option at the top of the page. Thank you!