How to make a spaceship: a band of renegades, an epic race and the birth of private space flight

Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space.

He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached.

He might not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world's first commercial astronaut.

The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world's largest governments had done before.

The story of the bullet-shaped SpaceShipOne, and the other teams in the hunt, is an extraordinary tale of making the impossible possible.