Experimenter

July 2013

Experimenter is a magazine created by EAA for people who build airplanes. We will report on amateur-built aircraft as well as ultralights and other light aircraft.

Issue link: http://experimenter.epubxp.com/i/142883

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Fast-forward to the present: From that original core of homebuilders, RAF grew and was ultimately supplanted by SCALED Composites (SCALED Composites, the Advanced Link to Efficient Development), the firm Burt founded to provide the larger aerospace industry with advanced design, fabrication, and prototyping services. Some SCALED projects, such as the Beech Starship, became well known; for others, SCALED took great pains to avoid publicity—for example, a structurally accurate half-scale B-2 bomber used to validate its stealth capabilities well before the first full-scale airplane made its first flight. And who was building these ultra-advanced hush-hush aircraft? Scientists with white coats and slide rules? No, the greater part of SCALED's staff were the same homebuilder types who'd been drawn by the possibility of working with Burt at the "bleeding edge" of aeronautical design; and the few white-coat types who did come on board soon found that at SCALED they'd most likely be following their project in person from the drawing board (or later a computer screen) down onto the shop floor, and in quite a few cases, up into the air. That's how Mike Melvill—former VariViggen and Long-EZ homebuilder—found himself flying SpaceShipOne beyond the atmosphere to help win the $10,000,000 X-Prize for the first nongovernmental manned space flight. Today, SCALED continues to push the frontiers of aerospace, and while the original RAF Building 13 "rat shack" still exists (now with metal siding and covered windows providing a suitably gloomy environment for the company's IT geeks), the company as a whole has spread out over quite a few new buildings on the Mojave airport. The original SCALED hangar, which itself has been enlarged and added to over the years, now houses a number of in-house and client projects I was not allowed to photograph. In addition to designing, building, and supporting new aircraft projects, SCALED still operates both the Proteus high-altitude research airplane and more recently the WhiteKnight mother ship for SpaceShipOne for various research projects. (SpaceShipOne itself now hangs in the Smithsonian) will be the largest aircraft ever built; its 385-foot wingspan is some 65 feet larger than that of the runner-up, the Hughes H-4 Spruce Goose (or over three times as long as the one used in the Wright brothers' first flight). The adjoining fabrication building, while not as tall, is almost equally large: When you're laying up a single-piece carbon spar that big, you need some long worktables. The Model 351—dubbed The Roc after the mythical Arabian Nights bird big enough to carry off an elephant—will be assembled from modular flat panels of composite material, for which the name "SheetRoc" seems, at least to this author, to be an almost inevitable choice. Perhaps recalling the days when the view from his office windows was dominated by rows of unused jet airliners stored at Mojave, SCALED designed the Roc to "avoid rein- Sierra Technical Services' shop; they make their CNC machine available to the homebuilders of Mojave. Next door, an even larger hangar, while operated wholly by SCALED, is dedicated to a single client: Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson's commercial space-tourism follow-on to SpaceShipOne. At present, the hangar contains the eightseat SpaceShipTwo as well as Eve, its four-engine mother ship, plus offices, support shops, and an impressive simulator that can be configured for either aircraft. Finally, down at the other end of the airport are the massive fabrication buildings and an even more massive hangar for yet another SCALED project—the Rutan Model 351 is the mother ship for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Stratolaunch project. Why such a big hangar? Well, the Model 351 Photography courtesy of Peter Lert Rick Aldrich and Allison Knupp stand in front of their recently fnished RV-7. It's one of four aircraf owned by SCALED employees that is currently in Phase 1 fight testing. EAA Experimenter 23

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