In an oral‑history style interview, Matt Steinmetz—self‑described as a lifelong Mojave Airport hangar enthusiast—recounts the evolution of Mojave from a desert mining hub and WWII Marine training base to a world‑renowned test site for experimental aviation. He explains how the town’s remote, sunny location and long runways attracted Burt Rutan, who founded the Rutan Aircraft Factory and later Scaled Composites, spawning a prolific era of prototype construction. Steinmetz highlights landmark projects such as the Voyager’s solo‑circumnavigation, the Global Flyer for Steve Fossett, SpaceShipOne (the first privately funded sub‑orbital spacecraft) backed by Paul Allen, and the massive Stratolaunch carrier aircraft. Throughout, he emphasizes the community’s DIY spirit, the rapid production cadence (often more than one aircraft per year), and the unique freedom Mojave offers to “do weird stuff” without interference, illustrating how a single visionary’s choice of location catalyzed decades of aerospace innovation.
Chapters
In this case, some Mojave history as told by one Matt Steinmetz. Matt is the canonical example of the Mojave Airport hangar rat. He's always tinkering and tuning something, whether it goes on the road or in the air. Mojave called to him, he answered the call, and now he can't leave.
So the history of Mojave is pretty long actually, this airport. Mojave itself, the town has been around for a long time. Like there are mines out in the desert and they would put borax, say, on a bunch mule train. They drag it into Mojave, load it on the trains. But World War II, they built this base for the Marines, and they would train fighter squadrons and stuff here, and then they'd ship them out to, you know, where— Guadalcanal or wherever for the war. And really nothing happened here until '70s, '80s. This guy named Dan Savovich showed up, and then another guy showed up, a guy named Bert Rutan, very famous in the aerospace community. He started at the border, and he started working north looking for a place that he could afford to do flight tests and do cool airplane stuff. And Mojave is the first place he got where he could actually pay for the rent. But it just so happens there's huge runways here and it's always, you know, sunny and far enough away from civilization that everybody leaves you alone. Yeah. So you can do weird stuff with airplanes and nobody bugs you. And then his brother came out of Vietnam and jokingly to keep him out of his hair, they sketched out this thing called the Voyager that was an around-the-world airplane. One tank of gas. That's kind of one of my more vivid childhood news memories is seeing that. 1986, right? Top Gun? And Voyager. Yeah, Dick down the ramp with a bunch of volunteers, they built the Voyager while Bert was running his company called Rutan Aircraft Factory. They kind of broke off this thing called Scaled that now was a legit company to go build prototypes for big companies and legit customers, not, uh, you know, became like a powerhouse. It became a powerhouse. They built, you know, roughly an airplane a year, if not more, which is crazy, right? I mean, nobody else, super crazy. It's just not done. Around about 2000, 2000 to 2003-ish, right? We started working on SpaceShipOne and that was my baby. And also we started working on the Global Flyer for Richard Branson. That was the around-the-world airplane the second time. This one was a single pilot, Steve Fossett. And so SpaceShip was being done for Paul Allen. Burt kind of dreamed it up. And then as soon as he had the idea, he said, hey Paul, once you fund this, we're going to go to space. And so Paul jumped in. And at some point after that, we did Stratolaunch, the world's biggest airplane down around the corner. And a lot of what you see here is just because Berber Tim, you know, found this place.
