This is Elbert L "Burt" Rutan, the hero of this story. He has long sideburns and eyes filled with a wild surmise. Your children and grandchildren may well be taught about him at school.

But, first, you need to know about the desert. It doesn't rain much in the American southwest, but, when it does, the water forms huge, shallow pools in the normally dry lake beds. Blowing one way, the wind pushes the water to one end of these beds; blowing the other, it pushes the water to the other end. This rocking motion smooths this flat land even further. And so, for thousands of square miles from the Mexican border up through California, Arizona and Nevada, there are vast tracts of hard earth, ironed by the elements to an unreal flatness. You can land 747s on this ground and any experimental fighter by Boeing or Lockheed can set down safely if it can't quite make it back to Edwards Air Force Base, Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, China Lake Naval Weapons Center, Nevada Test Site (Area 51 to all you geeks) or to any of the places so secret they have no names that mark the otherwise featureless maps of this wild and implausible region.

It is a landscape of dreams. "Dreamland", in fact, is the call sign of Area 51. Here is just scrub vegetation, sand, rocks, distant mountains, parched air, endless sky and, away from the interstates, the silentium dei - the silence of God. What else is there to do but dream dreams of great heights and stupendous speeds?

The mighty, hypersonic and utterly secret Aurora now flies out of Dreamland, as did the stealths, Blackbirds and U-2s. It was out here in 1947, at what was then Muroc but is now Edwards, that Chuck Yeager, supreme possessor of what Tom Wolfe called "The Right Stuff", flew a Bell XS-1 faster than the speed of sound. It was out here in 1967 that William Knight took his X-15 up to 4,520mph (mach 6.7).

And it was out here, at Mojave airport, a civilian testing site right next to Edwards, that, on April 18, 2003, Elbert L Rutan unveiled SpaceShipOne, probably the most ingenious aircraft ever designed, and White Knight, its airborne launcher, certainly the most beautiful.

"Why this shape?" I ask Burt as we stand in a hangar contemplating the White Knight. Why not?" he replies.

We fall silent for a few moments.

"It's your masterpiece, Burt."

"I know."

He's not so keen on the aesthetics of SpaceShipOne, but he's positively aroused by its successor, a larger version, now at the design stage, which, under the brand name of Virgin Galactic, will carry about six paying passengers into space. Burt can't show me the drawings of the new ship, but you can tell he wants to.

"It's a sexy-looking thing. It's something you look at and say, 'Wow! I want to fly that!' It's more than a coincidence that an aeroplane that looks good flies good too."

Burt's sideburns are long and dandyish. They are there, I conclude, to absorb the excess Right Stuff that squirts daily from his ears.