June 21, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Teresa Hendrix
Public Affairs
(805) 756-7266

Media Advisory: Burt Rutan Got His Educational Start at Cal Poly

To: News, science, higher education, engineering and feature writers and
editors
From: Cal Poly -- California Polytechnic State University, San Luis
Obispo, California
Re: SpaceShipOne designer, Voyager designer Burt Rutan

If you are working on biography stories or feature stories about
aeronautical pioneer Burt Rutan, you may want to mention Rutan is a
graduate of Cal Poly’s nationally-recognized College of Engineering.

U.S. News & World Report has ranked Cal Poly as the nation’s top public
undergraduate university in the west for 11 consecutive years. The
magazine has ranked Cal Poly's College of Engineering (CENG) as the top
public undergraduate engineering program in the nation at a nondoctoral
school.

For future SpaceShipOne stories, Cal Poly graduate Peter Siebold is also
one of three designated SpaceShipOne test pilots. Siebold is an
aeronautical engineer, experimental test pilot, and flight test engineer
at Scaled Composites, LLC, Rutan’s company. He holds a Bachelor of
Science in Aerospace Engineering from Cal Poly.

Burt Rutan graduated from Cal Poly in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in
aeronautical engineering. His Senior Project won the national student
paper competition of the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics that year. Rutan was awarded Cal Poly's first honorary
doctorate in 1987.

Cal Poly alumnus Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne made history Monday morning.
The craft landed safely in the Mojave Desert after flying into space,
reaching an altitude of 62.5 miles. Rutan has partnered with Microsoft's
Paul Allen to create the first private aircraft to travel into space in
a quest to claim the $10 million prize in the Ansari X-Flight
competition.

It's a quest that has been featured recently in the New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, MSNBC, the Washington Post,
and Associated Press.

Mr. Rutan has been written about in the San Luis ObispoTribune, profiled on BBC News, and was the subject of a feature profile by the Associated Press, carried in many newspapers including the Wall Street Journal and the San Jose Mercury News June 23.

More Information about Cal Poly:
http://www.calpoly.edu/simplythebest/simplythebest.html

More Information about Cal Poly’s College of Engineering:
http://ceng-web.calpoly.edu/about/highlights.php

More Information about SpaceShipOne:
http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/index.htm

More Information on the Ansari X-Prize
http://web1-xprize.primary.net/launch.php

Watch the launch on the Ansari X-Prize Web site

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