THE X PRIZE.

New Yorker, The, October, 2004 by Ian Parker

About six years ago, not long after Burt Rutan, an aircraft designer, had begun to think seriously of building a plane that could leave the Earth's atmosphere, he woke up at his desert home, a few miles outside the town of Mojave, California, and said, "I've got an idea." As Rutan's wife, Tonya, recently recalled, "We had been dead asleep--it was three in the morning. He ran to the bathroom with a sketchpad, came out waving a sheet of paper, and said, 'I know how to configure the spaceship! A shuttlecock.' " Her husband, she said, was "real close to my face, looking right in my eyes." Burt asked Tonya to think of the way a badminton shuttlecock falls: how it always falls in the same position, and falls slowly, its feathers causing drag. That would be a smart way, he said, to...