SpaceShipOne

Abstract

There was Paul Allen’s money and Peter Diamandis’s vision but, without Burt Rutan, Mojave’s resident genius, it is unlikely Virgin Galactic would be where it is today. A legend in the aerospace engineering arena, Rutan has a record of blazing his own trail and pulling off impossible ventures, often by designing very successful small aircraft. In 1986, he stunned the aviation world by launching Voyager, a hand-built airplane which was little more than a flying fuel tank with twin booms between the wing and the tail. The ungainly-looking craft sported two engines – one to push and one to pull. It struggled to get off the ground in its first flight laden with 3,100 kilograms of fuel, almost three quarters more than its gross take-off weight. Piloted by Dick Rutan and co-pilot Jeana Yeager, Voyager became the first aircraft to fly around the world nonstop without refueling. Twelve years later, Rutan became the first pilot to fly X-Prize hardware: Proteus, a twin-jet canard aircraft (Figure 3.2).