THE PLAN: Burt Rutan's June 21 plan for the manned space flight is similar to the X-15 program in the 1960s, in which an X-15 was carried aloft by a B-52 and dropped. The craft was boosted to high altitude by a rocket engine.

Rutan will have a twin-turbojet aircraft, called White Knight, carry SpaceShipOne, a three-seat rocket ship. At about 50,000 feet, the spaceship will be dropped from the carrier jet, White Knight.

The rocket motor is expected to fire for about 80 seconds, pushing the craft to Mach 3 in a vertical climb. If everything goes as planned, the spaceship will then coast to an altitude of 62 miles before falling back to Earth.

It will glide back toward Mojave, circle overhead, then land directly in front of the public viewing area on the same runway on which it took off about 85 minutes earlier.

Scaled Composites says that the pilot will be weightless for more than three minutes and see the blackness of space. The craft does not go fast enough to put it into orbit.

The craft's twin tails would be folded up for a shuttlecock effect as it re-enters the atmosphere. The pilot later reconfigures the ship back to a normal glider and lands it like an airplane on the same runway from which it took off.

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