This content was created by Ashlee Vance. This content was uploaded by Ashlee Vance. This is a YouTube video titled "The History of The Mojave Air & Space Port" (uploaded 2025-04-01). The excerpt is a single-speaker narration (labeled SPEAKER A) describing the history of Mojave as an aerospace hub—mining origins, WWII Marine base, and the rise of Burt Rutan, Dan Savovich, the Rutan Aircraft Factory/Scaled, and projects like Voyager, GlobalFlyer (Steve Fossett/Richard Branson), SpaceShipOne (Paul Allen), and Stratolaunch. The content is documentary-style historical commentary about aviation and spaceflight development in Mojave.
Chapters
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 of 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 Burt Rutan, very famous in the aerospace community. Yeah. 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. 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. 1986, right? Top Gun? And Voyager. Yeah, Dick down the ramp with a bunch of volunteers, they built the Voyager while Burt was running his company called Rutan Aircraft Factory. They kind of broke off this thing called Scaled. 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 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 an 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 Burt Rutan, you know, found this place.
