Space Ship One reached an unofficial altitude of 330,000 feet, or 100.5 km today in the quest to claim the $10 million X Prize.

The ship must reach the altiltude of 100 km in two flights during a two-week period to claim the prize. The Space Ship One team ambitiously scheduled their second flight for Monday, just five days away. But there was a problem during the flight:

SpaceShipOne, with astronaut Michael Melvill at the controls, dropped away from its mother ship above Mojave Airport, fired its rocket and pulled into a vertical climb. The ship appeared to roll severely for a time but then steadied as it apparently reached its intended altitude. It then began a gliding descent and landed at 8:33 a.m. PDC, about an hour and a half after it left.

The cause of the problem has not yet been determined nor whether or not it will cause a delay of the second flight:

Rutan said the roll problem would be studied and a determination made about delaying the second flight.

Melvill said he may have caused the rolling himself.

“You’re extremely busy at that point,” he said. “Your feet and your hands and your eyes and everything is working about as fast as you can work them, and probably I stepped on something too quickly and caused the roll. But it’s nice to do a roll at the top of the climb.”

Official comfirmation of the altitude is expected later today.

Maverick aerospace designer Burt Rutan, with more than $20 million in funds from Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, secretly developed SpaceShipOne and is well ahead of two dozen teams building X Prize contenders around the world.

It’s amazing that this could be accomplished for the trivial sum of $20 million, mainly because the returns are going to be enormous:

Two days ago, British billionaire Richard Branson announced that he was launching a commercial spaceflight service using a larger version of the SpaceShipOne rocket.

Slated to begin service in 2007, the rocket would take up to five passengers to about 80 miles above Earth, where they would feel weightlessness and see the blue sky turn pitch black.

The service, Virgin Galactic, would charge about $190,000 for the two-hour flight.

And with the race for the X Prize not yet won, the next great race has already been started:

Taking the space race one step further, a Las Vegas budget motel mogul announced this week the “America’s Space Prize,” which would give $50 million to the first team to build a commercial spaceship that can send five to seven astronauts into orbit.

The prize is five times more than the X Prize because the challenge would be far greater than sending a person to the edge of space. The vehicle would have to dock with an already orbiting craft, such as the International Space Station, well over 100 miles above Earth and then survive a fiery reentry similar to the space shuttle.

Personally, I’m placing my money on an American team.