I was deathly afraid, admits astronaut

The pilot who made a pioneering commercial flight to space told today how he feared he would be killed during the mission.

Mike Melvill was “deathly afraid” when a vital control system malfunctioned and the craft lurched violently to one side.

“I had a sort of resigned feeling in my mind that there was no way to get back with a situation like that,” said the 63-year-old.

Problems with his controls led him to think he would become a “squashed bug”, he told the New York Times.

He was so scared of death he nearly attempted a high-risk ejection, which would have doomed the multi-million pound craft.

“I was deathly afraid,” he said.

But Mr Melvill regained control with back-up systems and succeeded in piloting SpaceShipOne to an altitude of more than 62 miles, in the first ever privately-funded mission to space.

He spent three minutes in suborbital space, opening a bag of M&Ms and watching them float weightlessly around the cockpit.

Thousands of people gathered in the Mojave Desert in California to watch the inaugural flight take off and land.

The mission brought the design team, led by aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, closer to a prize set up to encourage commercial space travel in the future.

Mr Rutan became famous in the aviation world in 1986 when his Voyager plane made the first non-stop flight around the world without refuelling.

The commercial space race has been accelerated by the prize offered under a contest called the X-Prize, which will give the cash to the first group to put a three-seater craft 62.5 miles above the Earth twice within two weeks.

The X-Prize, which began in 1996, was set up by a privately-funded foundation.

During his inaugural flight Mr Melvill saw the “awesome” sight of the Earth’s curvature.

“It’s almost a religious experience,” he said.

He said fellow pilots had told him not to admit to his fears in public.

But he said: “I’m past that. I’m 63 years old. I know who I am.” Mr Melvill is expected to pilot SpaceShipOne to the near reaches of space once again within the next fortnight in order for the team to collect the X-Prize.