The saga of the world's first commercial manned spaceflight is one of the most extraordinary stories of making the impossible possible. That story of SpaceShipOne and the Ansari X-Prize is about exploration, ingenuity, and the tenacity involved in breaking limits. It is a story about small dedicated teams of engineers competing for a common goal. And it is about the birth of an entirely new and exciting industry.

The achievement was 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. When he realized NASA was winding down manned space flight, Diamandis set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. If the government wouldn’t send him to space, he would create a private spaceflight industry himself.

In the 1990s, this idea was the stuff of science fiction. Undaunted, Diamandis found inspiration in an unlikely place: the golden age of aviation. He discovered that Charles Lindbergh made his transatlantic flight to win a $25,000 prize. The flight made Lindbergh the most famous man on earth and galvanized the airline industry. Why, Diamandis thought, couldn’t the same be done for space flight?

Author of "How to Make a Spaceship" Julian Guthrie and Dan Kreigh (the Structural Engineer who worked on the spacecraft) will tell the story of the Ansari X-Prize, a competition driven by outsized characters—Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, John Carmack, Paul Allen—and discuss the construction/testing of the bullet-shaped SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne was a historic feat of aerospace engineering that produced the first privately built manned reusable spaceship to fly to space twice in two weeks. QConSF this year you'll learn about this feat of engineering and go along for the ride.