Scaled Composites Concepts

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight

by Julian Guthrie · 19 Sep 2016

early 1980s, aware of the risks in the business, where he could be sued for a builder’s mistakes, Burt folded his company and founded Scaled Composites to build a range of plane types and create prototypes. Now, in 1986, as Burt scanned the hallowed Edwards runway on a cold December morning

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fire coming from the boneyard in the early morning hours—the military occasionally used the planes for hostage rescue simulations. The three men walked into Scaled Composites, which was a collection of buildings and hangars in various states of upgrade, looking out onto the flight line. Inside the main entrance were pictures

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-takeoff, vertical-landing reusable “rocket for the people,” being funded by the Department of Defense and supervised by Pete Worden. Burt and the crew at Scaled Composites had built the DC-X’s aero-shell. After the tour of Burt’s planes, Marc, Peter, and Burt headed into a conference room. Before

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had known Peter since the early ISU days and was an investor in International Microspace. Wine had been in talks with Burt Rutan about moving Scaled Composites from the Mojave Desert to Montrose. Engineer Dan DeLong worked full time for Boeing and had been a subcontractor for NASA, doing the air and

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. Air Force needed a trainer for a new fighter plane, Burt built a scaled-down replica that would give them the same flight test data. Scaled Composites opened for business in 1982. Burt set a standard for working hard, but he also evangelized the need for fun. He would stop meetings to

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models,” said an excited Burt Rutan, rounding up a handful of engineers at lunch hour on a cool spring day in Mojave. The crew at Scaled Composites grabbed small foam airplanes and headed outside, walking down the flight line to the Mojave Tower. There, on the seventh-floor deck, eighty-seven feet

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a place where outsized ideas were not to be tamed. Stinemetze, in T-shirt, jeans, and with hair halfway down his back, had been at Scaled Composites for more than two years, and was still intimidated by the man he’d dreamed of working for since he was a kid in Kansas

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that Burt was exceptionally good at setting his sights on a specific goal and building a plane to meet that goal. French visited Burt at Scaled Composites in Mojave, listened to his plan for a spaceship, and asked: “Can you do this?” Burt knew French as an experienced space guy. He pondered

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Depot. Jim Akkerman had recruited retirees to work with him out in a field in Texas on a rocket that he dreamed of water launching. Scaled Composites was trying out used paintball gun tanks to hold air for the spaceship’s reentry control thrusters. Many of the teams regularly went shopping for

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Three A RACE TO REMEMBER 25 A Fire to Be Ignited On November 21, 2002, after delays, false starts, and missed deadlines, Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites was ready to do a first hot fire test of its hybrid rocket motor. At this point, the still-secret SpaceShipOne—Burt’s hope of

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would be a turning point in what Burt considered the most important project in his company’s history. Getting to this day had been difficult. Scaled Composites had wanted to build everything related to the outside of the motor, including the propellant tank, case, and nozzle. But Scaled was an airplane company

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the desert. The transfer of the nitrous began. A small control room, about the size of a horse trailer and called the SCUM truck—for Scaled Composites Utility Mobile—was situated two hundred feet away, protected by steel shipping containers. Among those inside the truck was Scaled pilot and engineer Brian Binnie

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guard. A new beginning. Hypergolic—that’s how it felt. Parts coming together and igniting. 26 The Test of a Lifetime Inside the shop of Scaled Composites, Matt Stinemetze frowned as he studied the nose of SpaceShipOne. Instead of looking sleek, forceful, and aerodynamic like the tip of an arrow, the front

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top-secret thermal protection was painted under the nose, belly, and wings. If someone looked closely enough, they might even see a sprinkling of oregano. — Scaled Composites had three pilots doing the flight testing of SpaceShipOne: Mike Melvill, sixty-three, Burt’s longtime go-to guy to bring the plane home; Pete

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sand and tipped over chairs, tents, and anything else not tied down. Even the Porta Potties had to be pushed back up. Not far from Scaled Composites, a makeshift RV park was now full. A long line of cars snaked from California Highway 58 into the newly renamed Mojave Air and Spaceport

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feat. SpaceShipOne had barely reached its goal of space, and pilot Mike Melvill had endured the flight of his life. To the public, it appeared Scaled Composites had hit a home run, hosting an estimated 25,000 people for the first private spaceflight and certifying the world’s first commercial astronaut. But

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Protégé (Siebold). Brian told his wife half jokingly that the shifting of loyalties made him feel like the reality show Survivor had set up inside Scaled Composites. Even Mike wondered about the way Scaled went about its pilot lineup. Shane generally kept the decision to himself until the day before a flight

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for the rest of their lives. Anderson also wanted to see local youth introduced to the aerospace industry and to glimpse how the team at Scaled Composites had achieved a global audience. Witt had said to Peter in one of their early planning meetings, “You see pictures of Kitty Hawk and there

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life and using that passion for social good. My Escape from Gravity is through aerospace, art, and adventure. How do you escape?” —After retiring from Scaled Composites in April 2011, Burt Rutan and his wife, Tonya, moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Burt came out of his short-lived retirement to build

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will ever design and build himself. Six of his planes, including SpaceShipOne, hang in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. —Mike Melvill retired from Scaled Composites in October 2007. He still flies his Long-EZ and Pitts biplane, logging at least 120 flight hours a year. He is also privileged to

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on. When we started working for Burt in September 1978, the whole company consisted of Burt and Sally and me!” —After the success of SpaceShipOne, Scaled Composites began work on SpaceShipTwo for Richard Branson and his spaceship company. Brian Binnie spent the decade after Scaled won the XPRIZE working through the many

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, from the guys who cleaned the shop to the engineers and pilots. The bonuses were the equivalent of the employee’s salary for a year. Scaled Composites is now fully owned by Northrop Grumman Corp. A number of people have left Scaled to work at Virgin Galactic, including Doug Shane and Steve

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Losey, the former crew chief of SpaceShipOne. Virgin Galactic is just down the flight line from Scaled Composites. Stratolaunch is being built in an enormous hangar in a far corner of the Mojave Air and Space Port. —Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic was

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1986, trailed here on the final leg home by brother Burt Rutan and friends Mike and Sally Melvill in their Duchess chase plane. Mark Greenberg Scaled Composites engineer Steve Losey works on the cockpit of what will become SpaceShipOne. Dave Moore The construction of Burt Rutan and Paul Allen’s secret spaceship

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program, SpaceShipOne—the rocket “mated” with the White Knight—at Scaled Composites in a hangar in the Mojave Desert, California. Dave Moore Scaled Composites unveiled its spaceship program to the world in April 2003. Here, Burt (left) with Mercury and shuttle spacecraft designer Max

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Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen (seated center) and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson (seated right) at his Mojave home on June 20, 2004—the night before Scaled Composites’ attempt to make history with the world’s frist private manned space program. The “vision summit,” as Burt called it, focused on goals for exploring

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the intricacies of a rocket engine. He said he had never seen anything that looked so complicated. I spent countless hours with the engineers at Scaled Composites and had long and wonderful talks with Brian Binnie and his wife, Bub. Brian’s story of getting knocked down and of his determination to

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, 284 Santa Monica Airport, 317 Santa Monica apartment, 235–36, 237, 243, 301 Sarigul-Klijn, Marti, 328 Saturn V, 13, 14, 24, 40, 118, 307 Scaled Composites, 54, 116–17, 128, 158–61, 245, 250–52, 296, 305–6. See also SpaceShipOne; and specific aircraft and persons update on, 407–8 Schankman

Principles of Corporate Finance

by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers and Franklin Allen · 15 Feb 2014

and depends on her investments for her income. Mr. Liu is a young executive who wants to save for the future. Both are stockholders in Scaled Composites, LLC, which is building SpaceShipOne to take commercial passengers into space. This investment’s payoff is many years away. Assume it has a positive NPV

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut

by Nicholas Schmidle · 3 May 2021 · 342pp · 101,370 words

to become an astronaut. He’d done stints in the Marines, the Air Force, and NASA, and he now worked for an experimental aviation firm, Scaled Composites, which Branson, a showboating British mogul, had hired to build and test a spaceship for commercial use. It was beyond zany, Branson’s dream of

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years, but retail aviation was tiresome and he was increasingly getting offers from private and government clients. He formed a new company in 1982 called Scaled Composites. Scaled became what the New York Times called “a creative battering ram for the Pentagon,” though its unclassified work earned Rutan global renown—airplanes that

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was at the age where employers wanted his experience in the boardroom, not the cockpit. There was one exception: Burt Rutan’s shop in Mojave, Scaled Composites. They were the cool kids in the test pilot world. Stucky knew some of them through his membership in the Society of Experimental Test Pilots

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could it be? That morning Colby drove out to the site and powered up the command post, an old Chevy they called the SCUM truck—Scaled Composites Unit Mobile. Scaled had recently equipped the truck with flat-screen monitors and a mini-fridge stocked with bottled water. Hours before the test. From

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corporate survival over taking any responsibility. (Virgin was happy to share credit for Scaled’s success, but in its submission to the NTSB, Virgin wrote, “Scaled Composites was responsible for all aspects of the flight test program at the time of the accident.” The NTSB concluded that the crash was the result

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Prize Rutan, Tonya Sagan, Carl Salina, Kansas Saling, Michelle Salter, James, The Hunters Salty Dogs SAPs (special-access programs) Saturn IB Saturn V Saudi Arabia Scaled Composites accused of sloppiness “cold flow” test explosion at crash of SpaceShipTwo and as engineering cult design of SpaceShipOne and party in 2009 and PR and

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Force receives Iven C. Kincheloe Award from Society of Experimental Test Pilots risk tolerance and rocket-powered flight test and Rutan and Saling and at Scaled Composites Schmidle (author) and Schmidle (Robert) and Schmidle’s “Rocket Man” profile in New Yorker SETP and shunned by Scaled Siebold and in SkiGull skydiving and

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(2018) before rocket-powered flights test flight with Beth Moses on board and as test pilot for NASA as test pilot in Middle East tours Scaled Composites in training squadron in Yuma, Arizona Virgin Galactic and wager with Fischer in Washington, DC at winging ceremony Stucky, Paul Stucky, Sascha Sturckow, Rick (“C

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, Neil deGrasse U-2 Under Armour United Airlines United Arab Emirates US Congress US Defense Department Vance, Ashlee Virgin Galactic absence of metrics and accuses Scaled Composites of sloppiness announces move to New Mexico author’s view of Branson’s dream of challenges faced by clings to its niche “Cosmic Brand and

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report to partnership with Under Armour Patterson and potential to be a viable business publicity and pursues legal action against Scaled Composites reschedules SpaceShipTwo flight rocket motor and rubber-fuel design developed by Scaled Composites and Schmidle (author) embeds with SpaceDev and Spaceship Company and SpaceShipTwo and Stucky and Sturckow and Virgin Hotel Virgin

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race

by Tim Fernholz · 20 Mar 2018 · 328pp · 96,141 words

airline, and he figured he understood the business of putting butts in seats for regular flights, so he created a joint venture with Rutan’s Scaled Composites, calling it the Spaceship Company (TSC). TSC would build a larger, improved version of the vehicle for regular passenger flights. And to that end he

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test their contraptions at a safe distance from the general population—and from skeptical corporate managers. Burt Rutan, the legendary aviation designer, operated his company Scaled Composites as a kind of private skunkworks here. A few groups—the Reaction Research Society, Friends of Amateur Rocketry, and the Mojave Desert Advanced Rocket Society

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privately funded, reusable, human-carrying vehicle into space twice in one week. The space shuttle program was still on the ground. SpaceShipOne was constructed by Scaled Composites, Rutan’s Mojave-based experimental aircraft company. He was the kind of guy who sported silver mutton chops, lived in a hexagonal pyramid house of

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the project; he hoped to jump-start a new age of commercial space. In the summer of 2004, the space shuttle was still grounded when Scaled Composites’ sixty-four-year-old test pilot Mike Melvill pulled the lever that dropped SpaceShipOne from its mother ship. He rocketed into space for the first

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program, which flew humans in space for the first time, had taken just over three years and cost less than $3 billion. The success of Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne a week before Griffin’s confirmation hearing showed that the private sector was, at least, capable of executing on the designs and theories of

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and the X Prize. To obtain both a mother ship and a passenger-carrying space plane, Branson created a joint venture with Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, called the Spaceship Company (TSC). It would be dedicated to building the flight hardware that Virgin Galactic—and perhaps, in time, other “spacelines”—would market

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and operate. In practice, this meant that Rutan’s Scaled Composites team was working on the hardware while Branson’s marketers made promises about it. The new, larger vehicle being developed by TSC faced some of

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company to redesign the propulsion system, and eventually bringing the project back in-house—pushed back Branson’s inaugural flight for years. A decade after Scaled Composites had won the X Prize with SpaceShipOne, SpaceShipTwo—the actual vehicle was dubbed VSS Enterprise—was finally entering the critical stage of its test program

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mission that had failed just days before. Siebold and Alsbury were respected test pilots who had dedicated their careers to testing next-generation spacecraft for Scaled Composites; Alsbury was survived by his wife and two small children. The two fliers were spiritual descendants of Chuck Yeager and the other rocket plane pilots

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My Virginity: The New Autobiography (New York: Portfolio, 2017), 212–14. exited the lower atmosphere: National Transportation Safety Board, “In-Flight Breakup During Test Flight Scaled Composites SpaceShipTwo, N339SS,” Public Meeting of July 28, 2015. the vehicle’s rocket engines: Andy Pasztor, “Problems Plagued Virgin Galactic Rocket Ship Long Before Crash,” Wall

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rules in US, 32 space traffic management, 233–34 telecommunication and television connection, 52 third world internet links, 229–32 and US Air Force, 9 Scaled Composites, 50, 93 explosion with nitrous oxide, 210–12 Sears, Michael, 188 Sercel, Joel, 126–27, 236, 240, 245–46 Serviss, Garrett, 46 SES, satellite television

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight

by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker · 1 Jun 2011 · 376pp · 110,796 words

. Brian Feeney at the 2005 X Cup 26. Burt Rutan with a model of SpaceShipOne 27. SpaceShipOne attached to White Knight z8. Mission control at Scaled Composites 29. Mike Melvill riding on top of SpaceShipOne 30. Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill in front of SpaceShipOne 31. Ansari x PRIZE successful flight celebration

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tell him," Peters recalled. Case in point: the Rutans. Both Burt and Dick Rutan were good friends of Truax. Burt had founded a company named Scaled Composites in 1982 to develop experimental aircraft. Truax would visit them in Mojave, California, and they would come to his house for barbeques. They always came

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registered team), at the 2005 X Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Courtesy of Brian Feeney. i 26. Burt Rutan, chief designer and founder of Scaled Composites, holds a model of SpaceShipOne. Photograph by Mark Greenberg, courtesy of Virgin Galactic. 27. SpaceShipOne attached to White Knight prior to its first suborbital flight

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over Mojave, California. Courtesy of Scaled Composites. 28. Mission control at Scaled Composites during the first private suborbital flight. Courtesy of Scaled Composites. 29. Mike Melvill riding on top of SpaceShipOne after the first successful suborbital flight. Courtesy of Robert Pearlman, collectsnncE

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closer look. The white, conical-shaped ATV stood sixty-four feet high and twentytwo feet wide, with a single huge side window near the base. Scaled Composites, the company of aviation visionary Burt Rutan, had been contracted to build the strange craft. It resembled a number of SSTO projects that had come

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settling down on base-mounted, retractable landing struts. The Delta Clipper could then be refueled and made ready once again for liftoff. Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites was contracted to build the DC-X's structural aeroshell and aerodynamic control surfaces. At sixty-two feet in height and a maximum fifteen feet

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the end of 1998, Hudson had raised only a fraction of what he needed to develop a vehicle. Capital was bleeding fast into overhead and Scaled Composites's development. Even before planning commenced on the ATV rollout, Hudson knew there was only enough money to debut and flight test the ATV, not

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on the task of managing the company as president and manager. They rented one of the hangars at Mojave not far from Rotary Rocket and Scaled Composites and started operations using their personal savings. xCOR's company philosophy, like Hudson's, was to make sure that rocketpowered transportation became commercially viable. Undoubtedly

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engine and guidance testing and unmanned test flights of the spacecraft in Mojave and White Sands. On 27 July 2,004 Burt Rutan announced that Scaled Composites had scheduled its x PRIZE launch for 29 September. That same day Feeney announced the unveiling of his vehicle. On 5 August 2004 the Da

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rocketplane i8. Micro-Space, Inc., Crusader X, single-stage rocket 19. PanAero, Inc., SabreRocket, single-stage rocketplane zo. Pioneer Rocketplane, xP, single-stage rocketplane zi. Scaled Composites, LLC White Knight, (carrier) two-stage plane/rocket, SpaceShipOne (rocket) zz. Starchaser Industries Ltd., Starchaser 4, (booster) two-stage rocket, Thunderbird (capsule) 23. Suborbital Corporation

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Gregg Maryniak zipped around the globe checking out the progress Of X PRIZE competitors, Rutan labored in complete secrecy at his Mojave, California-based company, Scaled Composites. No one at the x PRIZE Foundation had a clue what Rutan was building out there in the desert until the grand unveiling of his

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to a flight demonstration of Rutan's B-52, the White Knight, and a dramatic unveiling of SpaceShipOne from behind a curtained section of the Scaled Composites hangar. Both airplanes looked as though they had flown off the pages of a science fiction novel. The lithesome, gull-winged White Knight was powered

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to start the program until we knew that it could happen." Rutan was already referring to Scaled Composites as having created the first private manned space program, which was no exaggeration. Aside from the two new craft, Scaled Composites had developed a hybrid rocket propulsion system, a mobile propulsion test facility, a flight simulator

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a few thousand residents some ninety miles north of Los Angeles. It had little to recommend it other than its dry climate and its isolation. Scaled Composites was founded there in 1982, when Rutan began building airplanes with handcrafted composite materials. He spent the next decade reshaping the landscape of homebuilt aircraft

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vision. They've got their head up their ass, and they're all bookkeepers." By the 199os Rutan had finally turned his attention to space. Scaled Composites built components for Orbital Science Corporation, which was sending small satellites into orbit with a rocket plane launched from a Lockheed L-IOII airliner. Within

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. By April zooI the "Tier One" program, as the secret space project had been named, started official development and began to build its team. Both Scaled Composites and the X PRIZE Foundation recruited staff from the young and eager. At the x PRIZE office in Santa Monica, Diamandis began to build his

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Kobrick. "We had a pretty good time ... having those young, enthusiastic people working together." Meanwhile, back in Mojave, Rutan was doing the same thing at Scaled Composites with his cadre of young engineers barely out of college. According to Matt Stinemetze, Scaled's project engineer, "Burt has this unique knack to pull

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them out to the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but design really cool spaceships." Stinemetze was only twenty-four when he started at Scaled Composites, six years before SpaceShipOne's maiden flight. He was a kid from a small town in Kansas. Growing up, he loved everything about airplanes and

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smart." He had also helped a Raytheon engineer named Ray Hooper build an airplane in his garage. That connection opened the door for him at Scaled Composites. Stinemetze submitted his resume and was hired the next day. Since then he has done his own hiring at Scaled and has come to understand

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manpower most aerospace companies or NASA have at their disposal. But whether in organizational size or aircraft design, simplicity was counted as a strength at Scaled Composites. "Logistics kills you," Stinemetze explains. "People think [SpaceShipOne] is this high-tech thing, but it's not. It's as low tech as we can

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could have accomplished in my career if I had been as smart as him at that age." It would take almost three years for the Scaled Composites team to design, test, and fly White Knight and SpaceShipOne prior to its attempted suborbital flight. SpaceDev would be selected over Environmental Aeroscience Corp Development

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flight. "There was so much dependent on it. The government didn't want to fail that," Smith recalled. On a flight to Mojave to witness Scaled Composites's first suborbital flight attempt, Smith had the overwhelming feeling that something very extraordinary was about to happen. She sat next to a man with

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Owens felt as though they were "going to change the world." After Melvill barely reached one hundred kilometers, there was a lot of apprehension at Scaled Composites about tackling the x PRIZE weight requirement. They busily worked on boosting their rocket motor and stripping the spaceship of nonessential weight components to carry

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, `Yeah, absolutely."' Kobrick sent up his iron ring taped to a business card, while Owens did the same with her isu master's graduation ring. Scaled Composites employees also were given the chance to throw in their own personal items for the flight, including wedding rings and models. All the items flew

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Rotary closed down, Rutan said, "We'll find something for you to do." Binnie started working for Scaled Composites in zooo, just about the time the financing was arranged with Paul Allen. The night before Scaled Composites's second x PRIZE attempt, Binnie thought hard about the next day's flight while trying to

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home run; it's going to be a grand slam." Binnie slept only about two and a half hours that night and arrived at the Scaled Composites hangar early for his 4:3o a.m. preflight briefing. However, all of the scenarios he rehearsed in his head, all of his meticulous preparation

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Fossett to fly an airplane nonstop around the world. It was this endeavor that first brought Branson into a working relationship with Burt Rutan, when Scaled Composites was commissioned to build the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. Somewhat resembling the famed wartime P-38, with twin tail booms outboard of a smaller, central nacelle

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2003 Will Whitehorn, then Branson's project manager, flew to Mojave on GlobalFlyer business. While there he witnessed SpaceShipOne and White Knight being built on Scaled Composites's shop floor. Whitehorn immediately phoned Branson, his voice full of excitement and a few well-chosen expletives. "Forget the GlobalFlyer," he urged. "He's

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, Whitehorn eventually registered the Virgin Galactic name and started looking into the teams vying for the prize. So, when Whitehorn came upon a spaceship in Scaled Composites's hangar in 2003 and reported it to his boss, Branson immediately called Rutan and asked, "Are you really building a spaceship?" Rutan acknowledged that

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Virgin and Mojave Space Ventures. Virgin would purchase an exclusive license to SpaceShipOne's core design and technologies and would order five passenger spaceships from Scaled Composites for $50 million. A roughly equivalent amount would be invested in operations and infrastructure, bringing the total above $izo million. Even for the go-for

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developer for the program. Instead, the company had a menu of at least five developers on its 1999 program catalog, including Rotary Rocket's Roton, Scaled Composites's Proteus, Pioneer Rocket plane's Pathfinder, Bristol Spaceplanes's Ascender, and Kelley Space and Technology's Astroliner. The theory was to use whichever outfitters

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of safety above all else. So Wimmer is content to wait. He eagerly anticipates each milestone debut and scheduled flight test that Rutan and his Scaled Composites crew put out from time to time. Having been in the system almost a decade, he's in for the long haul and having fun

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, wearing matching white shirts with prominent Virgin Galactic logos, waved to the crowd from WhiteKnightTwo's cockpit windows. They taxied the plane in front of Scaled Composites's hangar, where the vii' guests had gathered. Named VMS Eve by Branson, WhiteKnightTwo was dedicated to his pioneering mother, Everett Branson. The craft began

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engaged in highly advanced aerospace research, design, and development. Prior to launch licensing, Mojave Airport already had as tenants such RLV companies as Rotary Rocket, Scaled Composites, XCOR Aerospace, and Inter Orbital Systems, and it continues to attract the best and brightest in the commercial space business to set up shop in

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and the FAA office teams, just as it had for licensing SpaceShipOne, as they addressed all of the new issues concerning commercial spaceports. Now that Scaled Composites has rolled out both WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, it is anticipated that flight testing and rocket development will continue at Mojave through SpaceShipTwo's maiden flight

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doesn't foresee suborbital flight as a means to an end. "It's not a stepping stone," he confidently notes, adding that the "architecture of Scaled Composites can't evolve to orbital capabilities." While the giant aerospace companies develop their own launch vehicles, as do EADS and some Russian ventures, Musk has

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reporters. The event bore the stamp of a new marketing vision, something more akin to Hollywood than to Mojave: klieg lights, young starlets, free champagne, Scaled Composites engineers being introduced as "rock stars," and Virgin Galactic's future astronauts dressed in black designer Puma jackets with "ss2 Unveil" logos. It was a

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or experimental aircraft, these were the vehicles that will actually take paying customers to space. In two years or three, when flight testing is complete, Scaled Composites will fill out Virgin Galactic's fleet of commercial, passenger-carrying spaceships with four more SpaceShipTwos. Rutan is predicting that forty or fifty spacecraft will

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, but Advertising Plan Fails." New York Times, 2,1 May 1991. Sanger, David. "A Japanese Innovation: The Space Antihero." New York Times, 8 December 199o. Scaled Composites. "Tier One-Private Manned Space Flight." http://www .scaled.com/projects/tierone/message.htm. Schmidt, William E. "London Journal; First Briton in Space, but Barely

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. http://www.rocketplaneglobal.com. Rocketship Tours. Web site. http://Rocketshiptours.com. "Russia Hosts First Crew of International Space Station." Transcript, cNN. com, 30 September 2000. Scaled Composites. Web site. http://www.scaled.com. "Sea Dragon Concept. Volume I: Summary." Aerojet-General Corporation, 29 January 1963. Simonyi, Charles. Web site. http://www.charlesinspace

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

by Christian Davenport · 20 Mar 2018 · 390pp · 108,171 words

spaceship design was, of course, unconventional. All of his planes were. A blunt eccentric with Elvis-like sideburns, Rutan had founded his curious little company, Scaled Composites, in 1982 in Mojave, where his experimental designs often had multiple wings, which sometimes went out and then curved up, making a U shape. Sometimes

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the world’s first commercial spaceship. That was the secret, the project he was keeping covert, shielded from the derision he knew it would attract. Scaled Composites, the cynics would say, a company of just a few dozen people, could not start a manned space program. Until it did. ON JUNE 21

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be flying three times the speed of sound, faster than it had ever flown before to a height of 62 miles. And the crew at Scaled Composites had made some last-minute adjustments to the vehicle that they hadn’t yet had a chance to test. Sitting in the cockpit just before

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. A new father, Siebold had a tough decision to make. As hard as it was to disappoint Rutan and the rest of the team at Scaled Composites, he couldn’t go through with it. The flight was just too dangerous. “Peter to his credit had lost faith in all the haste to

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that it was unsafe, insufficiently tested and poorly understood. To him, that was three strikes in a critical spaceship system and not worth the risk.” Scaled Composites would tell the public that Siebold was merely sick, and never let on about his concerns that the spacecraft was unsafe and not fully tested

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discuss what regulations should govern this new industry. But all that was for a later day. Now was a time to celebrate. Rutan gathered the Scaled Composites team in front of the hangar. “The important thing about today’s accomplishment is this is not an end,” he said, as Allen stood next

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of Branson’s adventures: to break the speed record for flying around the world. It was being built in the Mojave Desert by Rutan’s Scaled Composites. When one of Branson’s deputies went to check on it, he stumbled by accident onto something altogether different, something he knew his boss would

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a catastrophic accident. Branson had to go. PETER SIEBOLD WAS in the cockpit again. The forty-three-year-old test pilot for Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, which had built and designed SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic, was ready to fly this time. A decade earlier, during the Ansari X Prize, he’d

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. He knew he had to get there as soon as possible. This was the second fatal accident for the program. In 2007, three employees of Scaled Composites had been killed during a ground test of the engine’s nitrous oxide system. The explosion had charred the desert floor, which had looked like

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a war zone, with debris scattered everywhere and multiple people injured. The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Scaled Composites $28,870, later dropped to $18,560 after appeal. The explosion was “obviously horrendous for the families and a big setback for our program as

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up its nine-month investigation, concluding that a “lack of consideration for human factors” led to the midair breakup of the spacecraft. It found that Scaled Composites, which had built the vehicle for Virgin Galactic, had failed to properly train its pilots and did not implement basic safeguards to prevent the human

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to even consider that possibility was one of a series of systematic failures that had led to the crash. As board member Robert Sumwalt said, Scaled Composites “put all their eggs in the basket of the pilot doing it correctly.” Unfortunately, humans inevitably make mistakes, “and the mistake is often times a

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symptom of a flawed system.” Virgin Galactic responded by implementing an inhibitor that would prevent the pilot from unlocking the feather prematurely. And it fired Scaled Composites, saying it would build the spacecraft itself. “From now on, we’ve taken everything in house and anything that happens from today will be down

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space exploration.” Five years after that announcement, the plane was not yet ready to fly. But it was taking shape. Burt Rutan had retired from Scaled Composites, but Allen had hired his old company to build Stratolaunch in a massive hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port which was so big

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stand in front of SpaceShipOne after Binnie successfully flew the spacecraft in 2004, winning the Ansari X Prize. Copyright © Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC; courtesy of Scaled Composites. Elon Musk gives President Barack Obama a tour of SpaceX launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, 2010. Courtesy of NASA/Bill Ingalls. Paul Allen

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SpaceShipOne, 108 commercial space flights, 4 developing spaceplanes and shuttles, 269 human space travel research, 268 passion for space and aviation, 84–85, 265–267 Scaled Composites, 84 SpaceShipOne flights, 89–90, 96 Stratolaunch Alsbury, Michael, 212–214, 231–232 Amazon as funding for space exploration, 253–254 business strategy, 14–15

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, 249 Magellan, Ferdinand, 119–120 Manchester by the Sea (film), 254 manned flight Allen’s anxiety over, 91–92 risks and excitement of, 121–122 Scaled Composites plan, 85–86 See also Ansari X Prize; SpaceShipOne Manning, Rob, 39–40 Mariner missions, 223 Mars colonization and missions, 7 Bezos’s commitment to

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destroying satellite cargo, 239–241 Sputnik launch, 59–60 surveillance, 267–268 tracking asteroid collisions, 36–37 Saturn V rocket, 66, 129, 172, 188–192 Scaled Composites, 231 creation of, 80 kinks in the SpaceShipOne design, 93 Melvill’s SpaceShipOne test flight, 87–91 pilot rivalries, 82–83, 86–87 second flight

Makers

by Chris Anderson · 1 Oct 2012 · 238pp · 73,824 words

marketplace, and the consequences of things having been built by hand. This chapter is about three of my own Maker heroes. One, Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites, starts in the 1970s, at the beginnings of the modern DIY movement, and goes all the way to space today. Another, BrickArms, a Lego accessory

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-fi novels and the sketched imaginations of schoolboys. Today Mojave is the home of many of America’s commercial space companies. One of them is Scaled Composites, the aviation company founded by the legendary Burt Rutan. At the entrance to the Mojave Air and Space Port is a three-story craft called

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will never fly at all. The creation of a beautiful machine is the real appeal for many. This tinkerer DNA remains at the core of Scaled Composites. Many of the engineers rent space in the smaller hangars that line the runway in Mojave for their “projects,” which are usually gorgeous small aircraft

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résumé-builder, a laboratory for new ideas and a test bed for new techniques. Maintaining the link to the garage is how Scaled Composites stays ahead. The DIY culture of Scaled Composites comes from Rutan himself. Born in 1943, his teenage years were full of self-designed model airplanes and competition victories. He figured

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aerodynamics within the reach of anyone. Eventually, however, the economics of the DIY market proved too daunting and Rutan shut down RAF, instead focusing on Scaled Composites, the company he had started to design aircraft for commercial and military customers. The problem with the homebuilt market of the time was that companies

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companies and government contracts were irresistible. Most of all, Rutan wanted to design groundbreaking aircraft, not feed the endless demands of the kit business. Today Scaled Composites is owned by Northrop Grumman. For every high-profile design like SpaceShipOne, there is a cruise missile prototype or stealthy drone for the defense industry

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans · 31 Aug 2016 · 976pp · 329,519 words

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World

by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt · 30 Sep 2017 · 345pp · 84,847 words

Joshua Davis IBM Watson on the Jeopardy set Courtesy of Sony Pictures Television Advent, Thunderbird, Starchaser, Ascender, and Proteus Courtesy of the Ansari X-Prize Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne Courtesy of the Ansari X-Prize Chapter 9 Einstein blouses https://www.google.com/patents/USD101756 Sarah Burton: Kate Middleton wedding dress Photo

Space 2.0

by Rod Pyle · 2 Jan 2019 · 352pp · 87,930 words

deployment of the feathering system. “The National Transportation Safety Board determined the cause of the Oct. 31, 2014 in-flight breakup of Space-ShipTwo was Scaled Composite’s [Rutan’s original company] failure to consider and protect against human error and the co-pilot’s premature unlocking of the spaceship’s feather