Scaled Composites LLC
Scaled Composites, LLC is an aerospace and specialty composites development company located in Mojave, California (about 80 miles north of Los Angeles). Founded in 1982 by Burt Rutan, Scaled has broad experience in air vehicle design, tooling and manufacturing, specialty composite structure design, analysis and fabrication, and developmental flight tests of air and space vehicles. The employees at Scaled come from a diverse background of talents, experience, and interests. This unique combination of individuals helps promote an innovative and creative atmosphere. Scaled offers the opportunity to pursue career and personal interests in a manner that can be found nowhere else by following one simple rule: have fun.www.scaled.com
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Search complete. 16 mentions across 10 episodes found for "Scaled Composites LLC".
Oct 9, 2026
Christine BoyntonGUEST
He did give us a bit of an update on the demonstrator build.
Christine BoyntonGUEST
They're more than halfway complete with that at Scaled Composites again in Mojave.
Christine BoyntonGUEST
And then I did have a chance to speak with him for a bit on the sidelines to ask about the status of the engines for the Z-4.
Christine BoyntonGUEST
And at this stage, it sounds like all of the engine makers he described as remaining enthusiastic, remaining engaged in this process with the Air Force.
Tail DraggerHOST
Burt Rutan had been making the aerospace establishment uncomfortable since the early 1970s.
Tail DraggerHOST
He was working out of Mojave, California, through his company Scaled Composites, and he kept producing aircraft that looked wrong and flew right.
Tail DraggerHOST
Canard configurations, pusher propellers, hand-laid composite construction at a time when anyone serious about aviation still riveted aluminum.
Tail DraggerHOST
His VariEze and Long-EZ designs had taken over the home-built world and given thousands of pilots an airplane that handled like a sports car on the fuel burn of a rental car.
10 MINS LATER
Tail DraggerHOST
The Voyager flew only once.
Tail DraggerHOST
After that December morning at Edwards, it was retired and sent to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, where it hangs today in the Milestones of Flight Gallery.
Tail DraggerHOST
It keeps company with the Wright Flyer and Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis.
Tail DraggerHOST
The company an airplane keeps tells you something about what it meant.
Andy SadhwaniGUEST
And the view of the Earth is absolutely stunning.
Andy SadhwaniGUEST
So my story is that when I was in graduate school doing my master's, somebody had mentioned that, you know, hey, Bert Rutan, his company, Scaled Composites, is going to be sending their prototype to space because there is the Ansari XPRIZE competition, where if you travel to space twice within two weeks, you know, hitting a certain altitude, then you'd win this competition.
Andy SadhwaniGUEST
So I think it was like 100 kilometers, the prototype.
Andy SadhwaniGUEST
So Scaled Composites, I watched them do their flight.
Andy SadhwaniGUEST
I think it was like September 29th.
Andy SadhwaniGUEST
And eventually they sealed the deal less than two weeks later to win the award.
Matt O'DowdHOST
But it counts.
Matt O'DowdHOST
SpaceShipOne's adventure won its maker, Scaled Composites, the cool 10 million of the Ansari X Prize.
Matt O'DowdHOST
Virgin Galactic teamed up with Scaled Composites to form the Spaceship Company, with the plan to turn its SpaceShipTwo into a regular space tourism vessel.
Matt O'DowdHOST
That hasn't happened yet, for reasons I'll get back to.
Matt O'DowdHOST
So why hasn't private manned space flight become a thing yet? Because money.
TowerHOST
Now, the Mojave piece, Mojave has been the home of experimental aviation for decades, and there's a reason programs come here.
TowerHOST
The Scaled Composites operation is in Mojave.
TowerHOST
Bert Rutan built his most famous designs there, including Voyager, the aircraft Richard Dick Rutan and Gianna Yeager flew nonstop around the world without refueling in 1986.
TowerHOST
Spaceship One, the first privately funded crewed spacecraft to reach space, flew out of Mojave.
TowerHOST
Mojave has become one of the most important aerospace development sites in the world precisely because the experimental aviation community built it that way.
TowerHOST
Scaled Composites is there.
TowerHOST
The Virgin Galactic Heritage is there.
TowerHOST
The SpaceShipOne, the vehicle that won the Ansari X Prize in two thousand and four and triggered the modern commercial space race, was built and flown at Mojave.
Tail DraggerHOST
He had already designed the VariEze and the Long-EZ Canard Pusher composite homebuilts that had turned heads at Oshkosh through the late 1970s and proved that thinking differently about airframe geometry was not just theoretically appealing, it was practically superior.
Tail DraggerHOST
He had just started a company called Scaled Composites in Mojave.
Tail DraggerHOST
He thought about aircraft structures the way most people simply are not equipped to.
Tail DraggerHOST
Dick Rutan looked at the sketch.
Kevin CurranGUEST
Okay.
Kevin CurranGUEST
I mean, all of them are amazing individuals, but Mike Melville was the first employee of Rutan Aircraft Factory and then became the first employee by default of Scaled Composites.
Kevin CurranGUEST
And he's fascinating.
Kevin CurranGUEST
So basically the way that him and Bert had met was Mike built one of the home builds, a very big one, like in his garage in Indiana.
5 MINS LATER
Kevin CurranGUEST
Mike Melville, he was from South Africa, never graduated high school.
Kevin CurranGUEST
He was Burt's go-to test pilot, and he was just an incredibly intuitive flyer who had flown the vast majority of Burt Rutan's research aircraft.
Kevin CurranGUEST
Then you had Brian Binney, who had advanced degrees from Brown and Princeton, had flown 20 years in the Navy, and he came to Scaled Composites, which was kind of completely outside of the commercial test flight world, and that was kind of a big... bridge for him to overcome, to be in that world.
Kevin CurranGUEST
But incredibly intelligent, had run programs, ran the Spaceship One program, and their age differences couldn't have been more different.
TowerHOST
The King Airline was selling well, but Beechcraft's leadership wanted something that would signal a genuine leap forward.
TowerHOST
They approached Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, and asked what that future might look like.
TowerHOST
What Rutan proposed was radical on every axis.
TowerHOST
A canard design with a smaller wing mounted forward of the cabin to provide pitch control, pusher propellers with the engines mounted behind the main wing and the props spinning aft, and an airframe built entirely from composite materials.
TowerHOST
Not a structural aluminum spar anywhere in the aircraft.
TowerHOST
In 1983, Scaled Composites built an 85% scale proof of concept to demonstrate that the design would actually fly.
TowerHOST
It flew.
TowerHOST
Beechcraft watched.
Tail DraggerHOST
She has a way of describing those nine days that puts you right there in that cramped cockpit, and you'll find yourself wondering how either of them stayed sane.
Tail DraggerHOST
Bert Rutan retired from Scaled Composites in 2011, having designed 46 aircraft, each one stranger and more brilliant than the last.
Tail DraggerHOST
A man incapable of thinking inside any box that already existed, but all of that came later.
Tail DraggerHOST
On December 23rd, 1986, there was just the lake bed and the crowd and the airplane that smelled like fuel and had two exhausted people inside it and the knowledge that something had just been accomplished that could never be taken away.