Black Sky: The Race for Space

Witness to history: the first privately funded manned space mission

Black Sky: The Race for Space chronicles the first great aeronautical feat of the 21st century:  the development and launch of Burt Rutan’s revolutionary SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded, manned spacecraft to reach space.  We spent more than two years traveling back and forth to Mojave, where Rutan and his team built and tested their extraordinary design. The project was cloaked in secrecy until the very end, when SpaceShipOne was deemed ready to fly. (We couldn’t even tell our families what we were filming.)

We captured the thrills and terrors of the test flights, and the triumphant day when Rutan’s team and their backers won the Ansari X-Prize, a space competition awarding a $10 million prize for the first non-government organization to launch a crewed spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. That achievement heralded the dawn of New Space Age.

Produced for Vulcan Productions and the Discovery Channel, in association with Antenna Films, Black Sky was honored with a 2004 Peabody Award as the best in electronic media. The George Foster Peabody Awards, first awarded in 1941, are the oldest honors in electronic media and recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious public service by stations, networks, producing organizations and individuals.