Burt Rutan came home to Mojave over the weekend, nine months after retiring from Scaled Composites and moving to Idaho. He was here to mark the 25^th anniversary of Voyager’s non-stop flight around the world that his brother, Dick, and Jeana Yeager flew in 1986.

Burt Rutan spoke for two hours in a conference room in the Mojave Air and Space Port’s administration building on Saturday, holding an overflow crowd spellbound as he recounted the daring 9-day flight completed a quarter century this month.

Rutan gave the talk on Plane Crazy Saturday, a monthly open house held at the airport. The tarmac was filled with planes that Rutan had designed, and the parking lot was overflowing with cars as aviation enthusiasts flocked to Mojave to celebrate the historic flight. Later that day, a dinner was held at the Mariah Country Inn & Suites just outside the airport gates.

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NASA PROGRAM UPDATE

The 33-year odyssey of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has reached a distant point at the edge of our solar system where there is no outward motion of solar wind.

Now hurtling toward interstellar space some 10.8 billion miles from the sun, Voyager 1 has crossed into an area where the velocity of the hot ionized gas, or plasma, emanating directly outward from the sun has slowed to zero. Scientists suspect the solar wind has been turned sideways by the pressure from the interstellar wind in the region between stars.

The event is a major milestone in Voyager 1’s passage through the heliosheath, the turbulent outer shell of the sun’s sphere of influence, and the spacecraft’s upcoming departure from our solar system.

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In The Space Review this week… Debating the future of human spaceflight Congress returns to work this week with a NASA authorization bill among the many items up for consideration. Jeff Foust reports on the continued debate about what should be in that legislation, which will shape the future direction of NASA’s human spaceflight program. The real mistakes of the space shuttle program As the space shuttle programs winds down, […]