Burt Rutan has been fascinated with constructing aircraft from his own designs since his childhood. In 1982, he founded Scaled Composites, his California-based aircraft design, tooling, fabrication, and flight testing company. The firm's latest flying prototypes, the White Knight and SpaceShipOne, designed to take human passengers on the world's first private manned mission to the edge of space, recently won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private space travel. In early 2005, the Rutan-designed GlobalFlyer, a single-plane, single-turbofan aircraft, circumnavigated the earth, unfueled, in 67 hours.