This week SPACE.com takes a look at great rocketeers who helped spur humanity’s race into space:

In the 21^st century, human spaceflight is no longer the sole domain of national government agencies as proved by aerospace veteran Burt Rutan.

With a track record of novel aircraft design, Rutan (center in blue) led his Mojave, California-based firm Scaled Composites to go one step further. The result was SpaceShipOne, a suborbital spacecraft built with private funds and capable of carrying a human pilot – in a shirt sleeve environment – up to about 62 miles (100 kilometers) – into space and return to Earth safely.

Not only did Rutan make history on June 21, 2004, when SpaceShipOne launched from its White Knight mothership and inaugurate the era of privately-developed manned rocketships. SpaceShipOne also successfully launched twice in two weeks in October 2004.

That latter feat was enough to nab the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a suborbital spaceflight competition that has since morphed into the annual X Prize Cup to spur interest in private spaceflight.

SpaceShipOne now has a place of honor at the National Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. But Rutan is already hard at work on SpaceShipTwo, a multi-passenger suborbital spaceliner to be the workhorse of British billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism firm Virgin Galactic.

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: Scaled Composites/D. Logan.