On December 17, 2003 — the one hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk — a private spaceplane from Mojave went supersonic for the first time. Ten months later it won ten million dollars and ended government's monopoly on spaceflight.
A Pirep featured story · KMHV Mojave Air & Space Port, Mojave, CA
Mojave Airport opened in 1935 on the high desert floor north of Los Angeles to serve the gold and silver mining outside town. It had two dirt runways, one of them oiled, and no fuel. The Marines used it as an auxiliary training field in World War II and again during Korea. In 1961 the Navy handed it back to Kern County, and the county turned it into a place where aerospace companies could fly experimental aircraft cheaply, in restricted airspace shared with Edwards Air Force Base next door.
A designer named Elbert "Burt" Rutan moved his composite-airplane company, Scaled Composites, to Mojave in 1982. He had already made a name for himself with the canard-winged VariEze and Long-EZ homebuilts. In 1986 his brother Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew the Rutan Voyager — built and tested at Mojave — non-stop and unrefueled around the world. Through the 1990s, more aerospace companies followed: XCOR, Rotary Rocket, Masten, Stratolaunch. The desert was where you went to try things that hadn't been done before.
In 1996 the Ansari family put up $10 million for the X Prize: the first private team to fly a crewed spacecraft past the 100-kilometer Kármán line twice in two weeks would win it. Twenty-seven teams entered. Burt Rutan and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen formed Mojave Aerospace Ventures and built SpaceShipOne — a stubby composite craft with feathered wings that folded for re-entry, dropped from a high-altitude carrier plane called White Knight.
On December 17, 2003 — the one hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight at Kitty Hawk — SpaceShipOne flew supersonic for the first time. Six months later, on June 17, 2004, the FAA issued Mojave the first commercial spaceport license ever granted to an inland airport in the United States. Four days after that, on June 21, Mike Melvill flew SpaceShipOne to 100,124 meters and became the first private astronaut. On October 4, 2004, Brian Binnie flew the second qualifying flight to nearly 70 miles in altitude, and the X Prize was won.
SpaceShipOne is now in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall at the Smithsonian, hanging beside the Wright Flyer and the Spirit of St. Louis. The airport at Mojave was renamed Rutan Field in 2022. The aircraft boneyard there still holds hundreds of stored airliners. Virgin Galactic, Stratolaunch, Boom Supersonic, and a dozen successors all came because one private team flew to space from a dirt-runway mining airport — and made everything after it possible.