The San Diego Yacht Club responded by building two catamarans, one with a conventional soft sail (Stars & Stripes S1), and the second with a Scaled Composites -built wing mast (Stars & Stripes H3).
The handful of civilian planes that have used them include some NASA research aircraft, the Tupolev Tu-144 and Concorde, and the White Knight of Scaled Composites.
MirCorp and RSC Energia were the first to use this strategy for space exploration, which has emerged again more recently with Sir Richard Branson’s announcement to market Scaled Composites StarShip suborbital flights.
Scaled Composites (often abbreviated as Scaled), formerly the Rutan Aircraft Factory
composites | Scaled Composites | Aero Composites | Scaled Composites White Knight | Scaled Composites Tier One | Scaled Ground Cuckoo | Scaled Dove | Scaled Composites Stratolaunch | Scaled Composites Proteus | Saw-scaled viper, ''Echis carinatus | Composites |
The Centennial Challenges are based on a long history of technology prize contests, including the Longitude prize (won by John Harrison), the Orteig Prize (won by Charles Lindbergh), the Ansari X PRIZE (won by Scaled Composites), and the DARPA Grand Challenge (won by Stanford University in 2005 and Carnegie Mellon University in 2007).
The first prototype, a proof-of-concept aircraft intended to confirm the design's handling, was built by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites at Mojave, California.
The pilot for these three flights was Marti Sarigul-Klijn and the copilot was Brian Binnie (who later gained fame as pilot of Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne on its second X-Prize flight).