Rutan's brainchild SpaceShipOne is set to blast off for a final test flight Monday, aiming to puncture the 100-kilometer (62-mile) high edge of earth's atmosphere and the paradigm of space as a sphere beyond most mortals' reach.

If it does, it will win the coveted 10-million-dollar Ansari X Prize meant to foment a new era of private space travel, just 80 years after the dawn of commercial air transport.

If it does not, Rutan, 61, will still be a legend of aircraft and aerospace design.

The founder and CEO of Scaled Composites, the world's most productive aerospace development company, Rutan has helped conceive, develop and test numerous aircraft for the Pentagon and the US space agency NASA.

Rutan is known for using composite materials that due to their lightness, flexibility and resilience have pushed the envelope of aircraft design.

A civilian test pilot for the US Air Force during his youth, from 1965 to 1972, Rutan later conceived and created Voyager, the first plane to fly around the world without stopping and without refueling.

The vessel with its outsized wings is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

The plane took off from Edwards Air Base on December 14, 1986, piloted by his older brother Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, and returned nine days later, having flown a 40,000 kilometer (24,855 mile) loop around the world.

Rutan is also known as a designer of small aircrafts for personal use, available to amateurs to build in their garages.

His designs such as the VariEze et the LongEz use an old-fashioned tail-less "duck" design that gives the craft great stability.

Rutan is the type of person who lives his passions fully and openly.

In audiocassettes he sent to his family while testing airplanes for the US Air Force in California, during his twenties, Rutan told of his dream of making a difference in the world of aviation.

That drive cost him his first marriage. He admitted as much in a recent interview with the New Yorker magazine, joking that it was an easy choice between the airplane he was building and his wife.

In the late 1990s he turned seriously to the holy grail of aeronautics, a high-altitude research rocket capable of flying to 100 kilometers (62 miles) of altitude.

His new wife Tonya, more than twenty years his junior, tells of how her husband woke her at three in the morning to tell her excitedly that he had hit upon a concept for the spaceship design -- a badminton shuttlecock.

The shuttlecock, a lightweight cone with a rounded rubber nose surrounded by feathers, falls slowly and always in the same position, Rutan explained.

Its first flight took place six years later, opening the way for a revolution in private space travel.

Elbert Rutan was born June 17, 1943 in Portland, Oregon in the northwestern United States. He grew up in central California, the second of three children of a dentist.

As children Rutan and his brother convinced their mother Irene to drive down deserted roads at high speeds late at night so they could test model airplanes by holding them out the car windows.

During SpaceShipOne's second test flight Wednesday, the rocket plane's ballast weight was made up by a range of memorabilia proffered by team members, including the ashes of Rutan's late mother.

A graduate of California State Polytechnic University, Rutan also did coursework at the California Institute of Technology and at Edwards Air Force Base. He has lived since 1974 in California's Mojave Desert.

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