“How do you keep a spaceship simple?” Dan Kreigh rhetorically asks several dozen attendees of Plane Crazy Saturday, a monthly event for aviation fans held at the Mojave Air & Space Port (MASP). The group had convened on a sweltering August afternoon in the MASP’s boardroom to discuss aircraft aesthetics, tech and design up close. Continuing with his presentation, Kreigh explains how the question was first posed twenty years ago by his now-retired boss Burt Rutan. The maverick designer and founder of Scaled Composites, Rutan is known worldwide for his radically unorthodox aerospace designs and his signature mutton-chop sideburns inspired by none other than the 1970s-era Elvis.

Kreigh, a soft-spoken man with a gentle easy laugh, holds up the model of SpaceShipOne (SS1), one of Scaled’s finest achievements. The thirty-year company veteran built the scale model of the much-lauded spacecraft while working as a lead structural engineer under Rutan’s tutelage. Rutan hadn’t asked Kreigh to construct the model of SS1, but Kreigh decided to step up to his challenge. Besides, he wanted to see if Rutan’s inventive proposed reentry system could work in miniature. So he went ahead with designing and assembling his SS1 model but, for a time, kept it under wraps.

Kreigh demonstrates the SS1’s signature engineering breakthrough to Plane Crazy onlookers. After flying in suborbital elevation at 100 kilometers (62.1371 miles) upon reentry, the rear half of the wings “feather” while the twin-tail dramatically folds seventy degrees upwards as the plane elegantly descends back into Earth’s atmosphere. This engineering feat slows the plane’s reentry speed and increases drag without creating tremendous heat on the plane’s body, thus producing a shuttlecock effect that stabilizes the aircraft.

During SS1’s fast-paced and stress-riddled development stage in the early 2000s, Kreigh describes a pivotal moment when he sensed that Rutan was nervous—a trait he rarely exhibited in front of his team. Kreigh explains that SS1 engineers had only conducted a successful glide test—not a powered flight, so, understandably, the test pilots had a right to question the integrity of Rutan’s design.[1] After all, superficial design flaws can mean death for a test pilot. Aware of this intense scrutiny, Kreigh decided that it was time to unveil a scale model he designed to set the pilots’ and engineers’ minds at ease: “Whatever dimension you shrink it down to, it should still, if you’ve gotten it right, fly in a similar way.”

When Rutan first viewed Kreigh’s model, he, too, questioned whether it would work. Kreigh’s model performed the feather system functionality flawlessly on its first launch, thanks to Kreigh’s radio control of the maneuver. Rutan excitedly gathered the pilots and made Kreigh repeat the flight test out on the runway. “So yeah, I fly it again, run the motor, fly it up high and turn the motor off—it’s a glider—and then activate the feather, which comes down and then the plane recovers and then lands.” Rutan was ecstatic, telling the test pilots, “See, I told you it would work!” The test flight would be one of Kreigh’s best days of his career, commenting, “There were a lot of days like that, working at Scaled.”

On June 21, 2004, Mike Melvill[2] piloted SS1 to the Karman Line high above the Mojave Desert after separating from its White Knight mothership. As SS1’s hybrid rocket-powered engine engaged, Melvill was propelled skyward, and not without difficulty, to 328,491 feet.[3] The entire flight lasted a total of twenty-four minutes, three of which were flown in the weightless realm just beyond Earth’s atmosphere. This air-launched spacecraft was the first successful suborbital spaceflight to be privately funded, designed and built by civilians.[4] On that day, Rutan and company made history and an astronaut out of Melvill—as Rutan’s famous test pilot brother, Dick Rutan, likes to note. Scaled’s “reusable” spacecraft, launched from a small, unassuming airport in Mojave, California, would set three flight world records and shift the trajectory of this town from aeronautics into astronautics overnight.[5]

Before SS1, Burt Rutan was already highly regarded within the professional avionics community for his innovative aircraft designs. He was known for stripping away anything non-essential without compromising structural stress and weight through the use of breakthrough composite materials formed into distinct shapes while retaining functional flourishes. Still, with forty-plus cutting-edge aircraft designs under his belt, Burt Rutan was largely unknown to the outside world. Shortly after he and his team claimed the $10 million Ansari X-Prize in October 2004, his celebrity and the popularity of the company he built soared. The stakes for privately funded astronautics were now skyrocketing. Scaled’s success confirmed that relatively affordable commercial space tourism was indeed on the horizon—space travel was no longer the exclusive domain of NASA, military and other federally funded government programs.

By the mid-2000s, Scaled’s success story would usher in a slew of private, commercially driven astronautics companies to Mojave, including Stratolaunch Systems, Virgin Galactic, Masten Space Systems and Interorbital Space Systems, which collectively foresee a massive market in commercial civilian spaceflight occurring in the 2020s.

Without the XPRIZE, this extraordinary feat may never have occurred. When engineering entrepreneur Peter Diamandis announced the global competition in 1996, federally funded aerospace research had become dormant, with the Space Shuttle nearing the end of its program. The haunting memory of the 1986 Challenger disaster and, some years later, the 2003 Columbia explosion, contributed to the lack of public enthusiasm for the government-funded space program. By the mid-2000s, aerospace research and development had dwindled significantly.

With NASA’s shrinking budgets and future research encumbered by endless red tape, Diamandis foresaw the future of space exploration as dynamic public-private partnerships. Although Diamandis hadn’t secured actual funding, he “threw down a gauntlet” attracting twenty-six fiercely competitive international teams to the table. To claim the $10 million purse, one team would need to design an experimental, three-passenger spacecraft that could travel beyond 100 kilometers, survive atmospheric reentry, and have the potential to be reused for future suborbital spaceflights—all built and tested by private citizens.

Diamandis envisioned that the XPRIZE would herald a new era of commercial space exploration and tourism that would, in turn, boldly propel the once exclusively government-funded aerospace industry to consider civilian-led space travel seriously. The only setback was that Diamandis didn’t have money to guarantee the prize’s hefty purse.

As is often the case with significant innovations, dreams come first and remain grounded without proper financing. At the start, Diamandis, both an engineer and a physician, lacked personal fortune or a wealthy sponsor to pledge the $10 million prize. However, after searching high and low for eight years, Diamandis eventually found support from two Iranian-American entrepreneurs, Anousheh Ansari and her brother-in-law Amir Ansari. The two became sponsors of the first XPRIZE in May of 2004.6 Anousheh, a computer engineer, became the first Iranian in space when she traveled to the International Space Station as a privately funded astronaut on September 18, 2006.

Inspired by Diamandis’ challenge, Rutan and his team began looking for serious investors to provide the vast sums of money necessary to finance the years of research and development required to design, build and test such a spacecraft. After pitching to several corporations and wealthy individuals, including British billionaire Sir Richard Branson and late Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, the latter enthusiastically invested $25 million toward their effort.

After eight years of development, by early fall 2004, Rutan and the Scaled team completed the two required flights within a week of each other, which resulted in the team taking the Ansari XPRIZE. Rutan would later distribute some of the prize money as bonuses for his team. Having missed his earlier opportunity, Branson swooped in and acquired the technology behind SS1 and its White Knight carrier, forming Virgin Galactic along with The Spaceship Company in partnership with Scaled Composites. In addition, Allen would launch Stratolaunch Systems, also partnering with Scaled.

Engineering breakthroughs from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin advanced the Rutan/Allen/Branson achievements in a few short years. SpaceX developed the first liquid-fueled rocket that launched a commercial satellite into orbit in July 2009. Blue Origin successfully designed thrusters that provided soft landings of space capsules and rocket boosters. The race for reliably reusable launchers is now driving the scalability and financial sustainability of the industry. Better, this quartet of billionaires (Allen/Bezos/Branson/Musk) has helped propel the aerospace industry back into the spotlight and the public imagination.

Scaled’s XPRIZE accomplishment and the global attention it brought to the region was also a win for the town of Mojave—where it all began. “They didn’t do it from Vandenberg, they didn’t do it from California City; they did it from Mojave,” says Stu Witt, the former general manager of the MASP whose motto is “Imagination Flies Here.”

Witt continues, “Before the XPRIZE, Scaled had less than fifty people. NASA had 17,000 employees and 106,000 contractors! But if you’re in a profession where just your opinion can lead to litigation, the amount of insurance you need to carry is ridiculous. Whereas we had a saying, ‘Flight testing should be like sex—behind closed doors and with the minimum required participants’,” wryly states Witt. Karina Drees, MASP’s current general manager, puts it another way: “When it comes to testing, companies doing R&D here, we like to say we start at ‘yes’ and it takes a lot to get to a ‘no.’ We don’t want to give our customers a lot of hurdles and red tape.”

“That type of attitude is pervasive in the high desert,” says Dick Rutan, who famously co-piloted the Rutan Voyager aircraft, designed by his brother Burt, in 1986. Reflecting on the storied history of flight testing in the region, Dick comments, “I look across these dry lake beds—this is aviation’s hallowed ground. For all the airplanes that you enjoy—the safety and efficiency of them—there’s a lot of guys that worked and died to give us that. Mojave is an incredible place.”

Burt and Dick Rutan grew up in the agricultural community of Dinuba, located in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Dick, the elder brother, received his car and solo-pilot license on his sixteenth birthday. By nineteen, he had joined the Air Force, training as a fighter pilot. Burt, described by Dick as “the consummate geek,” would graduate from California Polytechnic in 1965 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. Not long after graduation, Burt served as a flight-test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base until 1972, when he left for a short stint in Kansas with inventive aircraft designer Jim Bede. Then, at the invitation of Mojave’s East Kern Airport District manager Dan Sabovich in 1974, Burt returned to the high desert to set up shop, encouraged by its wide-open spaces, cheap real estate and lack of prying eyes.

He brought several prototypes for planes he’d been building up to now in his garage, first the Rutan VariViggen (loosely inspired by a Swedish fighter plane—the Saab 37 Viggen), and later the Rutan VariEze and Rutan Long-EZ. Understandably, the mid-1970s are considered the height of the home-built, high-performance aircraft era. Rutan’s unique flair for design and engineering, including his signature breakthrough using inventive composite materials and other ingenious fabrication innovations, captivated the industry. His “open source” business philosophy challenged aviation designers too. Starting with the VariViggen, Rutan publicly shared the designs and assembly instructions, selling aircraft kits for hobbyists to build at home. As his reputation grew his protean creativity multiplied. “Research should be defined as doing something where half the people think it’s impossible and half of them think maybe that will work,” Rutan commented. “Any true breakthrough is one you can go back and find a time period where the consensus was, ‘well that’s nonsense.’ A true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.”

Dan Kreigh was one of those aspiring engineers who bought one of Rutan’s experimental-aircraft design guides while attending college. He discusses Rutan’s genius, both intentional and accidental: “So when he [Burt Rutan] starts Scaled Composites, soon he needs more engineers and designers. But by having introduced them to the Long-EZ and VariEze (I think he sold 11,000 booklets), there were like, 2,000 of these designs out there flying, so he had a whole army of people out there that already had built his airplanes [and in turn] know his personal philosophy and structural philosophy.” Kreigh says Rutan is “a natural teacher. He just loves educating people. He doesn’t worry about proprietariness because he’s always onto the next thing.”

 

Rutan’s custom kit planes built his industry reputation, but the Rutan Model 76 Voyager thrust him into a new level of national attention. The Voyager, co-piloted by his brother Dick and Jeana Yeager, became the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, on December 23, 1986. This multi-record-breaking flight covered 26,358 miles and took nine days, three minutes and forty-four seconds to complete. To do so, Rutan and Yeager flew Voyager painfully slowly—at an average ground speed of 116 mph to maintain the utmost fuel efficiency. As the days passed and the aircraft’s fuel load lightened, fuel efficiency increased from a mere nine mpg at the start to nearly fifty mpg by the end of the flight, but physical and mental exhaustion took their toll.

Consequently, the duo was unaware of the international media attention the flight was generating. So when Rutan and Yeager finally landed at Rogers Dry Lake to a reception of over 50,000 spectators, they were emotionally overwhelmed. A few days later, President Ronald Reagan awarded Jeana, Burt and Dick the Presidential Medal of Honor.

While in flight, Rutan worried that Air Force tower personnel would refuse to accommodate Voyager’s landing, thus invalidating the flight’s anticipated world record because he wasn’t sure if he had requested clearance before the flight had commenced.[7] When he humbly asked the on-duty flight controller permission to do so, the gentleman replied, “Sir, this is Edwards tower. Sir, we’ve canceled flying today and we’re all waiting for your return.”

Without question, both of the Rutan brothers are inspiring figures.[8] As a charismatic industry leader known for the extreme loyalty of his staff, Burt retained control of his increasingly valuable company despite Northrop Grumman Corporation, acquiring a 40 percent stake during the 1980s. After Northrop bought him out in 2007, Burt transitioned into semi-retirement. And while Burt is known as the maverick Renaissance inventor, Dick complements his brother as the brazen, unapologetic test pilot with intuitive instincts honed from years with the Air Force. Dick flew 325 missions in Vietnam (105 of those commandeering the F-100 Super Sabre for the elite, high-risk MISTYs), earning him a slew of military honors, including a Silver Star and a Purple Heart before he retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1978.[9]

To this day, Dick remains the tough-talking ex-combat pilot. He cops to needing a thrill whenever he’s been bored and is known to disappear for days into the desolate Mojave backcountry on his dirt bike. Now eighty years old, Dick still continues to reside in Mojave and regularly has breakfast at the MASP’s Voyager diner, open to the general public. Dick loves to recall the details of the record-breaking flight but equally emphasizes the grueling production process that he, Burt, Jeana, crew chief Bruce Evans and many volunteers endured over five and a half years while they developed, built and tested the aircraft. “Up until we started, I had not even a clue that an un-refueled flight around the world was possible. The absolute record was halfway around the world and that was by a goddamn B-52. And who in the hell are we? We didn’t have two nickels to rub together back in 1980.”

He reflects on the single-minded devotion this endeavor required and how this experience would be unrepeatable.“For five and a half years, I didn’t go to a movie or out to dinner—[I did] nothing for myself. This was Burt’s design and vision but the three of us [Burt, Dick and Jeanna] laid or checked every single strand of carbon fiber in that whole thing. We didn’t have any seatbelts, no crash survivability—any little turbulence the first four days, we were going to die.” In fact, the flight was nearly canceled after the wingtips scraped across the runway during takeoff. This accident resulted from the immense weight of fuel ingeniously stored within the wings and the other sections of the aircraft. However, Dick was far too driven to abort the flight—he quickly figured out how to shed the winglets without thinking twice.

All those years, with all the trials, tribulations, all kinds of stuff that happened—I’d sit down out on the ramp alone, look out over the high desert and close my eyes imagining what it would feel like to land at Edwards Air Force Base having accomplished aviation’s last milestone. I’d let that permeate into my psyche and I thought, “That would feel pretty damn good.”

Dick openly discusses his brushes with near-death without much prodding. For example, during his last combat flight over North Vietnam, he had to eject from his burning F-100 after losing his co-pilot to enemy ground fire. Another time Rutan bailed out over England during a Cold War mission due to engine failure. He laughs ruefully at his misguided attempts while competing in global hot-air balloon races—many near-disasters. Rutan’s upcoming memoir, The Next Five Minutes, includes these stories and many others. Dick explains the book’s title, “when my balloon blew up, when I got shot down, I remember reaching for the ejection handle and thinking, “I wonder what the next five minutes are going to be like?” As if to drive home that thought while reminiscing about his experience as a test pilot while being interviewed, Dick mordantly quips to Dan Kreigh, “Melvill and I, can you believe we’re both still fucking alive?”

For Burt to choose Mojave as the place to start his company was a stroke of genius. To be here was like a litmus test for anyone who worked for him. Like, how much do you love airplanes? ­–Dan Kreigh, Scaled Composites lead engineer

The town of Mojave (pop. 4,238), located about ninety-five miles north of Los Angeles at the base of the Tehachapi Mountains, in eastern Kern County, is where State Routes 14 and 58 converge. Travelers are likely to notice the acres of churning wind turbines punctuating the Tehachapis’ fawn-colored foothills. The wind farm, considered the second largest in the state and third-largest globally, comprises close to 5,000 turbines that produce about 3,236 megawatts of electricity.[10]

Also, at this highway juncture, more observant motorists may catch a glimpse of Mojave’s “Boneyard,” where abandoned commercial jetliners are cannibalized for parts or laid to rest. Others may notice several massive aircraft hangars looming in the distance to the east. However, if the driver fails to see these sights, the town’s signature industries will come into view upon entering Mojave via SR 14 (officially known as the “Aerospace Highway”). “WELCOME TO MOJAVE. Home of SpaceShipOne,” states two billboards picturing the famous spacecraft amid towering wind turbines framed by the rocket’s graceful, arched contrail. The billboards mark the town’s north and south entrances.

Mojave’s proximity to the aerospace hubs of Rosamond, Lancaster and Palmdale in Antelope Valley is vital for its continued economic growth. In addition, Edwards Air Force Base, strategically positioned at Rogers Dry Lake, the massive endorheic playa located southeast of the town, adds to Mojave’s aeronautic mystique. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the B Bell X-1 above the playa on October 14, 1947; later, numerous space shuttles would land on here beginning in 1981.

As motorists travel through Mojave’s gauntlet of fast food joints, roadside motels and gas stations along SR14, they are likely to encounter a freight train burdened with shipping containers lumbering past them on the Union Pacific tracks. Of course, the town itself is no-frills, providing services for truckers and motor travelers heading anywhere but here. But, for those who care to listen, the low rumbling of the train offers a sonic portal to Mojave’s historical past.

Founded in 1876 by the Southern Pacific, Mojave became the end of the line for the famous twenty-mule team that traveled the 165-mile route from the Harmony Borax Works in Death Valley between 1884 to 1889. The borax was then shipped via railway to Long Beach for sea transport. Mojave would serve as the desert headquarters for constructing the Los Angeles Aqueduct and has remained a vital rail transport route into the twentyfirst century.

Extraction industries have always had a strong presence in this region and can be observed in the discarded mining equipment and abandoned shafts that dot the landscape. In 1935, Kern County built the Mojave Airport to serve the area’s gold and silver mines. This remote desert airport featured two dirt runways (one oiled) but lacked aircraft fueling and repair services. It is interesting to note that the Golden Queen Mine, located five miles south of town, is one of California’s few actively producing, privately-owned gold mines. A Canadian outfit runs this 24/7 open-pit heap leach operation at nearby Soledad Mountain.

In 1941, airport improvements were made, including the addition of two 4,500 by 150-foot asphalt runways. At the beginning of WWII, the county transferred the airport to the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), which made further improvements. The Marine Air Station became the training and auxiliary base for USMC pilots while the Air Force developed and trained at the nearby Muroc Army Air Field, later renamed Edwards Air Force Base in 1949. Alongside the military operations, regional pilots used the airport for gliders and single and dual-engine planes. Tinkerers, collectors and hobbyist pilots came to enjoy the freedom and wide-open spaces along with a relative lack of dust compared to the other regional flight zones. Mojave became an aerophile’s paradise and plane culture quickly evolved.

Unfortunately, Mojave had to adapt after the USMC closed the airbase in 1961 and the county regained control. Although civilian consultants continued to work in the area, most families economically tied to the airbase left to relocate to Antelope Valley. The town seemed doomed until rancher/aviator Dan Sabovich took over management of the vacated airport in 1969 to hold plane races. By 1972, the East Kern Airport District (EKAD) had formed.

Yet, on the surface, Mojave seems an unlikely place for such technological advances to be born. The outwardly unadorned facilities at the 3,300-acre Mojave Air & Space Port (MASP) house research labs, offices, a two-mile-long runway along with nearly 100 airplane hangars with some concealing secret experimental aircraft prototypes against the backdrop of the Boneyard.[11] Less than a half-mile away is the largest hangar ever built for the biggest airplane ever designed—the Stratolaunch’s carrier aircraft, which recently completed its first high-speed runway test, but has not yet flown.

Near MASP sits a mascot of sorts, the now-defunct Rotary Rocket Company’s Roton ATV, a reusable, cone-shaped, vertical launch spacecraft. The atmospheric test vehicle raised considerable investment interest early on but, after three hover flights in 1999, became a sixty-three-foot monument to the industry’s inevitable false starts and failures.

On any given day, you might see either the Scaled Composites-designed White Knight Two or SpaceShipTwo—the swan-white mothership or its space-bound rocket—arcing gracefully in the skies above you, being tested by their owner, Virgin Galactic. And finally, if you look lower to the ground, you’ll see several plaques for test pilots who’ve died on the job over the last several decades. “The rule of thumb around here,” says Scaled pilot and engineer Zach Reeder, “is you lose about one friend per year.”

The MASP is an enterprise zone, but it continues to be county-owned and does not receive federal funding. All revenue comes from ground and building leases along with airport fuel sales. MASP receives some infrastructure grants from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) used periodically for taxiway and runway improvements. In 2018, however, of $770.8 million in federal airport infrastructure grants (the third allotment of the total $3.18 billion in Airport Improvement Program (AIP) funding), the Port received only $1.05 million to extend a taxiway. Why? There is a law on the books that limits their borrowing to half a million dollars. The MASP Board has tried and failed to change that at the government level, but as Drees notes, “I can’t borrow much money. I have customers that need an additional facility and I can’t grow fast enough.” But that kind of neglect has its upsides. One of nine “special district” airports within the state of California, the MASP has a five-member Board elected by the public, and for the most part, can engage in significant self-rule.

A common sentiment you hear around town is that the state government has ignored its aviation and aerospace industry because some state legislators fail to distinguish it from the military sector. But others say that federal eyes are watching keenly to see how the industry can expand, address challenges and execute a vision. Though geographically remote, MASP is still a prime proving ground. Drees feels that what happens at Mojave in the next five years will have a major impact on the national and global future of commercial space, UAVs[12] and short-range flying transport for the masses.

But while Mojave has become the little town launching the new era in commercial aerospace, its schools, community spaces, and general infrastructure are in desperate need of restoration to make the town into a thriving, livable place.

Of the 2,500 workers employed by the various aerospace companies housed at MASP, estimates show that less than one-quarter live in Mojave and instead commute fifteen and fifty miles to the facility. Moreover, many of the town’s remaining residents live near or below the poverty line in dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords, much like other Mojave Desert towns of similar size. But, of course, multiple factors have contributed to Mojave’s slow demise. For instance, SR 58 used to go through the town center, but a bypass extension completed in 2004 allows travelers and truck drivers to skirt Mojave’s town center and businesses entirely.

But Mojave’s lack of quality residential housing seems to be the real issue hampering town’s revitalization. Drees, along with George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic, spoke in various ways about how new housing is the first prerequisite for any meaningful improvements to come to the town. It sounds simple; unfortunately, it’s not.

Consider that the town has few development zones for new construction because zoning requires maintaining existing flight paths for safety where housing isn’t allowed. Plus, the area best suited for development is situated within a flood plain requiring extra insurance. Essentially, there is no real estate within town limits readily available for growth.

Drees, a popular town figure known for her astute stewardship of the MASP, admits that she advises most new hires not to live in Mojave. She’s seen people settle in Mojave and give up after a year or two, sometimes leaving their jobs and the region altogether. “The important thing to me is that they stay in their job, not necessarily where they bed down at night.”

A Scaled test pilot who did decide to reside in Mojave is Zachary Reeder, a boyishly charming late thirty-year-old hailing from “the boonies of East Texas.” Growing up in the 1980s, Reeder eagerly watched the landing of the Voyager flight as a young boy. He recognizes how this watershed event forever altered his career trajectory. Reeder later attended Texas A&M, where he majored in-flight engineering like his father. Six days after graduation, Reeder quickly headed west to Mojave, immediately landing as Scaled’s 120th employee.

Calm, energetic and thoughtful, Reeder rapidly rose to become one of Scaled’s top-tier test pilots over the thirteen years he has worked there. Reeder is part of the Stratolaunch flight crew and leads the wing design team. Now considered a “company statesman,” Reeder provides mentorship and guidance for the younger group of engineers and test pilots coming on board at Scaled.

Reeder acknowledges how the Rutan brothers served as instrumental figures and values his relationship with both men. “Dick is a really good friend, but every time I talk to him, it’s just an affirmation of what I realized as a kid; ‘Oh, you don’t have to get a boring job and move to the suburbs’.” He goes on to state, “You get to know someone and take their presence for granted, but the fact that we’re buddies and we’ve flown together is a validation of why he was so inspirational to me as a kid.” Burt, too, phones Reeder once a month to check-in.

Of the 600 Scaled employees, Reeder comments that “I would say probably less than fifty live in Mojave. Only a couple of the engineers live here, but most of the fabricators that live here grew up here. So almost everyone [working here] lives somewhere else, which I philosophically find inconsistent and that’s part of the reason we tough it out here.”

Rather than moving to nearby Tehachapi or Lancaster, Reeder and his wife purchased a historic adobe church in town that they’ve been slowly fixing up. Having started a family, they’ve made a conscious decision to stay put in Mojave for the long term while finding ways to contribute to their community. For instance, the afternoon he was interviewed, Reeder was busy setting up their home for a live house concert planned for that evening.

As for the town’s constant employment turnovers, Reeder has witnessed this firsthand. “The experience-per-lifestyle slope is pretty steep here, so for a lot of people, once they have these highly specialized prototyping skills along with enough experience to get a good-paying job, we lose people to more attractive startups; like SpaceX.” He goes on to state, “Mojave is sort of like the Xerox PARC of aviation development—there’s a constant turnover of people that show up. Some gain experience and put their name on some ridiculous-looking airplane project before they go off and do something more reasonable with their lives.”

Reeder anticipates that he and his Scaled colleagues provide more than just skill sets building successful and innovative spacecraft—they can offer “confidence and problem-solving” to the world stage. “There’s a misconception that we do what we do out here because we have a body of knowledge that’s not accessible. We have no idea how to build the world’s largest plane. We have to figure that out.”[13] If Reeder and his colleagues do so, they’ll have something much more creative and inspirational to share with the rest of the world.

Still, the commercial, civilian-driven astronautics industry, centered at Mojave, has suffered its share of significant setbacks that have resulted in fatal casualties.

On July 26, 2007, three Scaled employees died and three were injured when a tank of nitrous oxide exploded and destroyed a test stand during a rocket propulsion test run. On Halloween, 2014, the Virgin Galactic/Scaled team suffered a highly publicized aerial disaster when the test flight of the VSS Enterprise failed and crashed, in the Mojave Desert, killing Michael Alsbury and seriously wounding his co-pilot Peter Siebold. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators determined the following year that the accident was due to pilot error, when Alsbury prematurely unlocked the plane’s re-entry feathering stabilization system as the craft separated from the mother ship. Eleven seconds later, the VSS Enterprise violently broke apart.[14] NTSB’s Chairman Christopher Hart would later criticize the spacecraft’s designers for insufficient safety protocols, highlighting their “failure to consider and protect against the possibility that a single human error could result in a catastrophic hazard to the SpaceShipTwo vehicle.”[15]

The spacecraft’s engineers have since developed a color-coded fail-safe inhibitor along with revised flight operator training protocols that would prevent the pilot from engaging the feathering system too early. After the accident, Virgin Galactic took over all aspects of building and testing SpaceShipTwo.[16]

Of late, pilots Mark “Forger” Stucky and Rick “CJ” Sturckow completed Virgin Galactic’s fourth successful flight test of VSS Unity when it entered the mesosphere in the early morning of December 13, 2018. Traveling at Mach 2.9, this re-engineered version of SpaceShipTwo reached 51.4 miles above Earth—just a hair above the mark essentially considered the edge of space. If Virgin’s commercial flights commence, passengers who’ve forked over a hefty $200,000 to $250,000 apiece will be propelled to this fifty-mile-plus height to witness the sublime curvature of the earth while experiencing a few fleeting moments of zero-g weightlessness amid a blanket of stars. So far, Virgin Galactic has 600 aspiring astronauts signed up for future suborbital flights. However, Branson insists that he will be its first passenger to fly and that Virgin Galactic’s commercial passenger flights will be underway by 2020, if not sooner.[17]

Beyond Virgin Galactic’s lofty ambition to get paying customers into space within two years, the company has plans for future facilities at five possible locations worldwide within the next decade, starting with the 18,000-acre Spaceport America sited near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. This controversial endeavor pitched to Branson by former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson in 2007 has already received $200 million in taxpayer dollars for facility development and construction. Richardson secured public funding of the project from New Mexicans by promising 5,000 new jobs and up to $1 billion in new revenue—both of which have yet to materialize. The company will use the Spaceport as its operational headquarters when commercial spaceflights begin. Still, CEO George Whitesides insists that they will continue to manufacture spacecraft and support vehicles in Mojave, stating, “Mojave, California is actually the only place in the world where you can design a spaceship, build that spaceship, test that spaceship, and then fly that spaceship into space. I really think it’s the only place.”

Although it seems that Mojave will remain the home base for dedicated aerospace entrepreneurial risk-takers, competition remains fierce between this exclusive club of aerospace billionaires who are each vying to get their paying customers into space first.[18] The stakes are high, too, for the various state officials dangling tax breaks and other incentives to encourage these entrepreneurs to set up shop in their backyards. For instance, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin and Elon Musk of SpaceX have additionally staked R&D and launch sites outside of California.

Blue Origin, headquartered in Kent, Washington, has manufacturing plants in Alabama and Florida.[19] Their suborbital commercial launching site, located near the town of Van Horn, Texas, was selected to launch their curiously shaped reusable spacecraft, New Shepard,[20] that takes off and lands vertically. The spacecraft will eventually propel up to six paying passengers above the Karman Line during a fully autonomous eleven-minute roundtrip flight.

Musk, in turn, leased NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to successfully launch his 230-foot-tall Falcon Heavy rocket from this “multi-user spaceport” on February 6, 2018.[21] SpaceX signed a twenty-year agreement to use the Florida space center for future test-launching operations. Musk is also developing a private location near Brownsville, Texas, to launch SpaceX’s BFR (Big Falcon Rocket). He hopes to colonize Mars to establish a “fallback planet” for humankind.[22] Without a doubt, these enterprises have the potential to translate into lucrative investment profits—a 2017 Bank of America/Merrill Lynch report estimates that this burgeoning commercial aerospace industry could potentially generate $2.7 trillion within thirty years. However, a similar report by Morgan Stanley lists only $1.1 trillion by 2040 in comparison.[23]

The general public sees these mega-wealthy “space barons” mainly interested in bankrolling their childhood space fantasies rather than attempting to save the planet. But Bezos, in contrast, has stated that “space travel and rocket launches, through tourism and entertainment” should not provide “high-priced amusement rides for the wealthy.”[24] Instead, his longstanding vision entails colonizing space to protect Earth by relocating ecologically damaging industry off the planet. Subsequently, Bezos imagines Earth as a gigantic park zoned for “residential and light industrial” use only.[25]

Of course, Bezos and his cohort’s collective vision brings up far more questions than it can provide answers for, including a plethora of philosophical concerns regarding the moral and ethical implications of space colonization and possible exploitation of worlds beyond our own. As this industry evolves and matures, issues such as these will need to be openly addressed and debated within a public forum well beyond the corporate boardroom.

But for now, their goal is to reach the boundaries of space with infallible vehicles that safely transport paying civilians as planned. Only time will tell whether Mojave can remain the center of this exciting era of commercialized aerospace travel, extraterrestrial exploration and future multi-planetary colonization. After all, this is where that elusive “demon of the air” was finally vanquished, so it appears that Mojave’s prospects remain endless.

Daniel Housman conducted research and interviews for this dispatch. Audio interviews with Dick Rutan and Zachary Reeder were conducted by Kim Stringfellow. Sound design by Tim Halbur. Scott Buckley provided music for the Dick Rutan audio track. Video footage of Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity SpaceShipTwo launched on December 13, 2018, courtesy of Virgin Galactic under their editorial fair use license. Housman and Kim Stringfellow would like to thank the following individuals, including Bill Deaver, Karina Drees, Cathy Hansen, Ted Hodgkinson, Dan Kreigh, Dezso Molnar, Eugene Nemirovsky, Lorelei Oviatt, Zach Reeder, Dick Rutan, George Whitesides and Stu Witt. This article is co-published with KCET Artbound. Visit Artbound’s Mojave Project page here.

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