result of Burt losing his medical 13 years ago
because of heart surgery. He considered donat-
ing it to a museum. “We got it out and washed
it, and I flat out could not bring myself to bring
it down because it is the only example of this
type in the world,” he said. “It just seemed
criminal not to have it out there flying.”
Burt plans to bring the Boomerang to
Oshkosh this year, along with the Catbird, a
pressurized, single-engine aircraft with coast-
to-coast range and high fuel efficiency. It, too,
hasn’t flown in years and has been hanging
from the ceiling of a Scaled hangar in Mojave.
“If you look at my career for general avia-
tion, there are some real significant designs. If I
let the Boomerang and the Catbird go into
museums, the examples that are out there flying
are the ones that have mediocre performance,”
Burt said. “You’ve got to keep these airplanes
flying, so that’s what’s going to happen.”
In fact, there is a group working on a tur-
boprop version of the Boomerang that would
have coast-to-coast range. But like many of
Scaled’s projects, Burt would not elaborate,
deferring to the client to do the talking when
the design goes public.
Burt considers the Boomerang the "most significant general aviation airplane" he's done. Its
asymmetrical design prevents it from having the
problems traditional multiengine aircraft experience when losing an engine.
PROTEUS: A STEPPINGSTONE TO SPACE
While two of his favorites haven’t been in the
air much in the past decade, keeping Proteus
flying hasn’t been a concern. Since Mike made
its first flight in 1998, Proteus has flown a total
of 3,000 or 4,000 hours. The large atmospheric
research jet was one of the few designs that
the company funded itself.
A small company came to Scaled because it
wanted to develop broadband on demand with
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) circling cit-
ies. Scaled did a study and concluded it could
work with manned aircraft. Scaled’s parent
company at the time thought it was worth the
investment to develop the aircraft. To make it
more justifiable and lessen the risk, Burt devel-
oped five other applications for Proteus. “One
of them was a single-place manned spaceship
for suborbital flight,” Burt said. “Others were
reconnaissance things, atmospheric research,
that sort of thing.”
While the initial idea to provide broad-
band never panned out, Proteus has been
flown on projects for at least 2 0 different
customers. It just completed a three-year
research project for NASA, and it has flown
atmospheric sampling missions with deploy-
ments to Australia and over the North Pole.
It also was used for the initial glide tests of
the X- 37, and it was flown for approxi-
mately 1,000 hours to develop radar for
the Global Hawk UAV.
When it was being designed, one possible use was
for Proteus to carry a single-person craft to high
altitude, where it would be launched into space—
an idea that came to fruition with White Knight.
SpaceShipOne
Unquestionably, SpaceShipOne is Burt’s
crowning achievement to date. On June 21,
2004, Mike piloted SpaceShipOne to an altitude of 62 miles above the California desert,
completing the first privately funded manned
spaceflight in the history of the world. In
October that year, SpaceShipOne flew to space
for the second time in less than a week to claim
the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
“Nothing will top the SpaceShip,” Mike
said. “I mean, the goal was so ridiculous.”
When Burt first suggested to Mike that the
technology existed to fly in space as a pri-
vate company, Mike didn’t think he was
serious. “I just laughed in his face,” Mike
said. “I just thought, ‘Poor old Burt, he’s
gone over the edge.’”
And that’s exactly where they went—over
the edge of space. The key to SpaceShipOne’s
success was the “carefree re-entry” made
