▲ On October 4, 2004,SpaceShipOne dropped from its mother ship White Knight and flew to the edge of space—more than 100 km above the Earth’s surface.
▲ In his workshop in the Mojave Desert, California, Burt Rutan stands before the spaceship he designed.
1 Airplane designer Burt Rutan was 14 years old when the U.S.S.R. launchedSputnik 11 He
believed that government research into space travel would someday mean he too would be
5 able to journey to space. By the mid-1990s, however, Rutan had realized that waiting for
the government wasn’t going to work. It was then that he resolved to build his own
spaceship. “If my dream was going to come 10 true—of floating2weightless in the black sky
and being thrilled by the sight of Earth from outside our atmosphere3—I’d have to get
things started myself,” said Rutan.