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Back to the Future Rutan to Return to Space

Posted on: Wednesday, 29 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

MOJAVE - Burt Rutan builds an aircraft like no one else's.

His spindly Voyager - half the weight of a Honda Civic, but the wingspan of a 737 airliner - flew around the world on one tank of gas. His small, swift fiberglass-over-foam VariEze and Long-EZ revolutionized kit-built airplanes.

Now with his rocket-powered SpaceShipOne - poised for its next flight Wednesday - Rutan is trying to win the $10 million Ansari Prize for the world's first privately built, reusable spacecraft.

Often described as a maverick and something of a curmudgeon, Rutan has a position in aviation that can be measured by the presence of four of his aircraft in the Smithsonian Institution's collection. Rockwell International, builder of the space shuttles, has just two there.

"Burt is an honest-to-goodness genius," said Roger Launius, curator of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. "I think he has the ability to solve problems that other people have wrestled with. He has demonstrated that over and over again."

The 61-year-old Rutan has created nearly three dozen research aircraft, plus several one-of-a-kind projects: a twin-wing transport prototype for the Pentagon's research agency, a high-altitude jet called the Proteus, a wing sail for an America's Cup racing yacht, components for a winged space rocket and a General Motors show car.

Rutan is mostly disinterested in talking to the news media, unlike older brother, Dick, who after piloting Voyager around the world ran for Congress and Kern County supervisor. Burt Rutan declined to be interviewed in advance of this week's flight, but previously has explained his motivation.

"I want to see if I can do it," Rutan said at last year's unveiling of the three-man winged spaceship, built in secret at his Mojave plant.

Raised in the San Joaquin Valley town of Dinuba, Rutan built flying model airplanes as a boy.

He earned his pilot's license as teenager, along with older brother Dick, who went on to become an Air Force fighter pilot and later set a number of flying records, including for the Voyager around-the-world flight.

After college, Burt Rutan went to work at Edwards Air Force Base as a flight test engineer. In his spare time, he designed and built a wooden aircraft, inspired by Sweden's Viggen military jet.

For two years, he worked for a Kansas company that created the tiny jet featured in the James Bond movie "Octopussy," then struck out on his own.

Rutan returned to the Antelope Valley to form the Rutan Aircraft Factory in Mojave and develop light home-built aircraft.

His VariEze was unconventional, built with fiberglass wrapped over foam instead of the aluminum or wood-and-fabric prevalent among home-builts. It had an engine and propeller in the back and, up front, tiny winglets called "canards" - French for "duck."

The VariEze and the later, larger Long-EZ developed a legion of fans who built them in garages and airport hangars.

"It just looks strange, and it's wonderful. It's very efficient and very fast," Long-EZ owner David Orr said.

Orr, an attorney for Mazda, owns another Rutan design, the twin- engine Defiant - with propellers both front and back, and lacking a conventional tail but with a canard up front to eliminate stalls and a wing in the back with upturned tips to reduce drag.

"He's got an amazing way of taking known technology and creating something new from it," Orr said of Rutan's design skills. "It's incremental, but it's incremental in a direction the other aviation companies are afraid to go.

"He's a prodigious idea man, and he seems to be able to carry them out."

In 1982, Rutan created his Scaled Composites to develop research aircraft. The Mojave company, which now has 135 employees, describes itself as the world's most productive aerospace prototype development company.

Rutan's Voyager, built largely of composites and powered by one engine up front and one in back, flew around the world unrefueled in December 1986. Its nine-day flight earned aviation awards, including the Collier's Trophy, earlier earned by Orville Wright and the first Mercury astronauts, and a Presidential Citizen's Medal presented by Ronald Reagan.

Rutan sold Scaled to Beech Aircraft Corp. in 1985, then bought it back again with investors in 2001 after it was put up for sale by a Portland corporation that had acquired Beech in a merger.

And, in 1996, Rutan began work on the concept of his SpaceShipOne. Full development began in 2001 - in total secrecy.

More than $20 million for the project came from billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a partner in the DreamWorks SKG studio and owner of the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team and Seattle Seahawks football team.

The 25-foot-long SpaceShipOne is carried aloft by another Rutan- designed aircraft, a twin-engine jet called the White Knight, then ignites its motor to zoom into space. It glides back to a landing at Mojave Airport, like the space shuttles or NASA's X-15 rocket planes of the 1960s.

While the shuttles are sheathed in high-tech materials to guard them from the heat of re-entry, SpaceShipOne uses a typically unconventional Rutan alternative. To slow the craft for re-entry into the atmosphere, twin tail booms pivot upward, acting as a giant speed brake so the craft descends like a giant badminton shuttlecock.

To win the X Prize $10 million, SpaceShipOne must top 62 miles - as it did on June 21 - then do it again within two weeks. The first flight is scheduled for Wednesday. For the second, Rutan has said he'd like to do it Oct. 4 - the 47th anniversary of the launch of the first satellite, the Soviet Sputnik.

At the spacecraft's unveiling, Rutan said he hoped his success would spur the same sort of innovation and experimentation that occurred after the Wright brothers flew their airplane in Paris in 1909.

"If I can do it, with this little company and people in Mojave," Rutan said at the unveiling, "there'll be a lot more people who will say, Yeah, I can do it."

Charles F. Bostwick, (661) 267-5742

chuck.bostwick(at)dailynews.com

IF YOU GO:

Mojave Airport will open its gates to spectators for Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne launch. Admission the morning of each launch will be $20 per vehicle.

Gates will open at 3 a.m. Wednesday. Recreational vehicles can get in starting at 5 p.m. the night before for $50.

Traffic may be heavy - it backed up for miles before SpaceShipOne's June 21 flight that drew thousands of spectators - so organizers advised spectators to plan to arrive by 5 a.m.

To reach Mojave Airport, spectators can travel north on the Antelope Valley Freeway until it becomes two-lane Highway 14 just outside Mojave. Turn right at the first stoplight onto Highway 58, then left on Airport Boulevard.

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