SpaceShipOne

The composite construction, the weight discipline, the relentless efficiency work, all of it carried forward into other programs.

Years later, it found its way into SpaceShipOne, the first privately built vehicle to reach space.

But that is another story.

Sources for today's segment include the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Voyager Aircraft Foundation records, and contemporaneous reporting from Aviation Week and Space Technology Magazine.

To date, only one privately developed craft has carried a person to space.

This was SpaceShipOne.

In 2004, the first private astronaut, Mike Melvill, blasted this rocket-powered plane into a sub-orbital trajectory, topping 100 kilometers in altitude and only just kissing space.

But it counts.

SpaceShipOne's adventure won its maker, Scaled Composites, the cool 10 million of the Ansari X Prize.

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.

That hasn't happened yet, for reasons I'll get back to.

But Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and his Blue Origin company is neck and neck in the whole re-landing rockets thing.

The Virgin Galactic Heritage is there.

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.

Stratolaunch is there.

That ecosystem of engineers, machinists, composite fabricators, and experimental test pilots exists because the community invested in it over decades.

I'm terrible.

No, Mike, that spaceship was called Spaceship One.

Oh, okay.

I'm way off then.

He's one of the most unconventional minds aviation has ever produced.

the man who gave us some of the most innovative homebuilts in history, and eventually Spaceship One.

Bert thinks about airplanes the way a sculptor thinks about marble.

He sees what isn't there yet.