SpaceShipOne, which in June entered history as the first non-military space rocket, will stage its second sub-orbital flight in California's Mojave desert, in what its creators hailed as the start of a new space race.

The flight was scheduled to take place just two days after Burt Rutan and British tycoon Richard Branson announced a tie-up to start a "galactic" airline aimed at taking a huge step towards commercial space travel.

SpaceShipOne will seek to equal its June 21 feat when it touched the edge of space, 62 miles (100 kilometers) up, before making what its creator Rutan admitted had been a scary return to base here.

Rutan was upbeat about the prospects for Wednesday's flight of his stubby rocket plane, which -- if successful -- will take him and his US team halfway to pocketing the 10-million-dollar Ansari X prize.

To win the prize being offered by the non-profit US-based X Prize Foundation, a manned, reuseable spacecraft must be sent into space twice in two weeks.

"We are all very confident that we can pull this off and turn it around very quickly," the 61-year-old Rutan said, vowing to better the 328,000 foot sub-orbit SpaceShipOne achieved in June.

Scaled Composites founder and president Burt Rutan speaks at a press conference about his team's attempt to win the USD 10 million X Prize by completing two successful flights non-governmental manned spaceflights in SpaceShipOne, 28 September 2004 at Mojave Airport in California. SpaceShipOne, which will launch in the Mojave Desert 29 September in the first atempt on the way to the prize, successfully completed the first non-governmental manned spaceflight in history in June 2004. AFP Photo by Robyn Beck

But, Rutan warned, he and the Mojave Aerospace Ventures team were taking the first steps into a largely unexplored new era.

"Anything can happen," he said, but "we believe our engines are extremely robust in the sense of the danger of it turning into a fireball."

South African-born Michael Melvill, 62, is to pilot the craft, becoming the first ever non-military astronaut.

A specially adapted jet, White Knight, will take SpaceShipOne up into the sky at 6:47 am (1347 GMT) and the space vessel will start its rocket engine at a height of 47,000 feet (15 kilometers).

It should then enter the fringes of space, leaving the pilot weightless for around 3.5 minutes, and taking the craft to the second phase of its quest for the prize money, organisers said.

If the flight is a success, Rutan's spacecraft will make a new flight on Monday to qualify for the Ansari X Prize, which more than two dozen teams have set their eyes on.

The winner must carry the pilot and the equivalent weight of two passengers. Instead of lead weights, boxes of memorabilia and trinkets supplied by team members and sponsors -- who include major names such as candy maker M and M and soft drink 7UP -- will act as ballast.

The Ansari foundation launched the prize eight years ago to give the same impetus to space travel that the Orteig prize did to inspire Charles Lindbergh's first transatlantic flight in 1927.

Rutan and his company Scaled Composites joined with Microsoft founder Paul Allen and his firm Vulcan to form the Mojave Aerospace Ventures team.

There are 26 teams in contention for the Ansari prize but SpaceShipOne believes it is the leader, according to Sarah Evans, a spokeswoman for the Ansari X Prize foundation in St Louis, Missouri.

"The other teams have not given notice that they will fly," she said.

A Canadian team, Da Vinci, which has linked up with the world's biggest online gambling website, goldenpalace.com, plans to launch a manned rocket attached to a balloon at 90,000 feet (27,000 metres). The return to Earth would be with a parachute.

The Canadians had planned a trial run on October 2 but postponed it.

Rutan expects SpaceShipOne to attract a lot of investment to the sector, and that in a few years people will be able to buy tickets for sub-orbital flights.

Rutan sat by Branson's side in London on Monday when the British founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways announced he had signed a 14 million pound (25 million dollar) accord with Mojave Aerospace Ventures to set up Virgin Galactic, the first company to offer trips into space for the general public.

The project will use technology based on SpaceShipOne and Branson has predicted the first flights could take place in three years.

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