The South African-born Melvill told the New York Times, in an interview published Wednesday, that SpaceShipOne lurched to the left and suffered a key control system failure that left him feeling "deathly afraid" and fearing he was going to be a "squashed bug".

At one point during the ascension, he even considered aborting the flight.

"I had a sort of resigned feeling in my mind that there was no way to get back with a situation like that," he told the Times.

Melvill activate backup controls to regain control of SpaceShipOne, which on Monday flew up just over 100 kilometers (62 miles) to become the first privately financed mission into space.

"I was deathly afraid," he admitted of the rough flight up.

Melvill, 63, said his age was a factor that may have helped him maneuver the troubled ship and glide to back to Earth safely.

Melvill said his experience allowed him to respond quickly to the crisis.

"An old guy can pull that out of his brain and say, 'This is what I did last time."

During the trip, Melvill experienced the feeling of zero gravity and played with a bag of floating M and Ms candy.

"I opened my hand and moved my hand away --they just stayed there spinning like little satellites! I reached in and took another handful and just flung them," he told the Times.

Burt Rutan, the engineer who developed the rocket-plane, acknowledged after the flight that there had been troubles but did not give their extent.

Rutan said at the time: "It was no big deal in terms of safety but it was not a smooth flight in terms of trajectory."

"The anomaly we had today is the most serious flight safety systems problem that we have had in the entire program and the fact that our backup system worked and we made a beautiful landing makes me feel very good. The backup systems worked."

Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, helped fund SpaceShipOne, which cost 20 million dollars.

SPACE.WIRE