In 2004 Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne (shown here with its White Knight carrier) became the first privately funded aircraft to achieve suborbital flight. It is now on display at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum (Left: Scaled Composites; Right: Jim Koepnick/EAA/Virgin Galactic))

‘Rutan looks ahead to a future when ordinary people would spend their vacation nest eggs on hops outside the atmosphere, and ride “transfer vans” to unwind in orbiting hotels’

On June 21, 2004, the crowd at Mojave, California, cheered as an ebullient Mike Melvill wriggled out of the little winged capsule in which he had just made a brief, violent trip to the fringes of outer space. Burt Rutan, the guiding genius of the project, later stood before a blaze of press cameras and compared the emotion of Melvill’s return to what they both had felt long ago when, searching in darkness over the Pacific, they had glimpsed the lights of another of Rutan’s creations, Voyager, with Burt’s brother Dick at the controls and barely a sip of fuel left in its tanks, as it returned home from its nine-day nonstop circumnavigation of the globe.

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Three decades earlier, this same Burt Rutan had been a lone entrepreneur selling plans from which hobbyists could build tiny foam-and-fiberglass airplanes in their garages. Today, by the force of his ambition, a messianic personality and the brilliant originality of his engineering, he had cast himself as an upstart rival to NASA. His tiny hotrod SpaceShipOne, consisting essentially of an airtight cabin glued—literally—to the front end of a homemade rocket motor, had gone to space. And this had been accomplished for a piddling $25 million or so, less than the price of one or two of sponsor Paul Allen’s private jets.

Under the distorting stream of hype, which flowed as freely as champagne, the outlines of what had actually been accomplished were briefly indistinct. But this was unquestionably the first private manned space flight, if you accepted—as the FAA did when it ceremonially pinned its first civil astronaut’s wings on Melvill—that a few seconds spent coasting above 100 kilometers belongs in the realm of “space flight.” Rutan’s populist hostility to the slowness, the myopia and the timid and self-serving bureaucracies of “big government” was on display, and fed the zeal of his admirers. He fanned the flames with funny stories of the absurd obstacles with which the FAA’s new office of commercial space transportation littered his way, including the demand that he ensure that no desert tortoise would be harmed by SpaceShipOne’s flight. Presumably, none was.

Likening the day’s events to Wilbur Wright’s 1908 demonstrations of his Flyer in France, Rutan looked ahead to a future—not far off, he implied, now that the energies of private enterprise had finally been uncorked—when ordinary people would spend their vacation nest eggs on hops outside the atmosphere, and ride “transfer vans” to un­wind in orbiting hotels.

Burt Rutan was born in 1943 near Portland, Ore., but he grew up in Dinuba, a farm town in California’s San Joaquin Valley. His real name is Elbert. He used to take some pleasure in noting that E. Rutan is Nature spelled backwards, but the dorkiness of Elbert bothered him, and by persistent misspelling he has become Burt (as in Reynolds)—not Bert (as with Ernie). His father George, a dentist who had been a schoolmate of Richard Nixon’s in Whittier, and mother Irene, who died a few years ago at 84, had two boys and a girl. Burt was the youngest. His sister Nell was an American Airlines flight attendant. His brother Dick, a Vietnam-era F-100 pilot and part-time adventurer who once ran for Congress (he lost to a professional politician), has been sufficiently newsworthy for people occasionally to confuse him with Burt. Dick, who most likely considers global warming a liberal hoax, once made the papers when an airplane in which he was traveling landed at the North Pole, broke through unexpectedly thin ice and sank.

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