A bustling airport in an otherwise desolate landscape served as the backdrop for the unveiling of what’s been hailed as the world’s first private space venture. On April 18, Burt Rutan, owner and founder of Scaled Composites, an aviation and space consulting company located in Mojave, Calif., officially took the wraps off of a two-year-old program that has the goal of launching three people into space aboard an affordable and reusable platform.
“Space travel in its current form is primitive,” Rutan said during a press conference in the main hangar of the Scaled Composites facility, where more than 400 press and aviation personalities gathered, including retired NASA spacecraft designer Max Faget and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin. “We have retreated from former capabilities. When Buzz was on the moon, he probably thought that we’d be on Mars by now. But in the past 42 years of space travel, there have been only 241 manned spaceflights, including the Russians, for a total of 431 people in space.”
