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Kreigh demonstrates the SS1’s signature engineering breakthrough to Plane Crazy onlookers. So he went ahead with designing and assembling his SS1 model but, for a time, kept it under wraps. Besides, he wanted to see if Rutan’s inventive proposed reentry system could work in miniature. Rutan hadn’t asked Kreigh to construct the model of SS1, but Kreigh decided to step up to his challenge. The thirty-year company veteran built the scale model of the much-lauded spacecraft while working as a lead structural engineer under Rutan’s tutelage. Kreigh, a soft-spoken man with a gentle easy laugh, holds up the model of SpaceShipOne (SS1), one of Scaled’s finest achievements. The maverick designer and founder of Scaled Composites, Rutan is known worldwide for his radically unorthodox aerospace designs and his signature mutton-chop sideburns inspired by none other than the 1970s-era Elvis. Continuing with his presentation, Kreigh explains how the question was first posed twenty years ago by his now-retired boss Burt Rutan. The group had convened on a sweltering August afternoon in the MASP’s boardroom to discuss aircraft aesthetics, tech and design up close.
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“How do you keep a spaceship simple?” Dan Kreigh rhetorically asks several dozen attendees of Plane Crazy Saturday, a monthly event for aviation fans held at the Mojave Air & Space Port (MASP).