Mojave may become the next Cape Canaveral if Burt Rutan gets his way.

He said that he sees ordinary people flying into space within the next 10 to 15 years.

Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, which is funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, had a successful test launch on June 21 and will officially try to take off into space once again on Wednesday at the Mojave Airport for the Ansari X-Prize competition.

Mojave is about 55 miles east of Bakersfield.

“The (Ansari X-Prize) was established very similar to how Charles Lindbergh won an x-prize to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris and very similar to the early days of powered flight that were invited to St. Louis to demonstrate aerial flight for prize money,” said Stuart Witt, manager of the Mojave Airport, who is also a Kern Community College District trustee.

Witt said that about 300 people will be working to ensure that the launch happens successfully.

“Three hundred people is a drop in the bucket compared to what the NASA organization would put on a space mission,” he said.

NASA spokesman, Michael Braukus reached by phone in Washington, D.C., praised the X-Prize competition.

“We think it’s a fabulous contest. … We’re looking forward to the next attempt by Burt Rutan,” he said.

Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, is competing against teams from around the world.

“There are 26 or 27 registered competing teams,” said Witt.

“The first team to register and notify the X-Prize Foundation that they were prepared to file for the purse was Scaled Composites. The second one was a firm out of Canada and they’re scheduled to fly their first flight on Oct. 2. Scaled Composites will fly their first flight on Sept. 29,” he said. The firm out of Canada will be launching out of Saskatchewan, according to the X-Prize Web site, www.xprize.org.

Elaine Briscoe, office manager at the X-Prize’s headquarters in St. Louis, Mo. in a telephone interview, said that the basic rules of winning the X-Prize purse are that once an X-Prize flight is launched, another must be launched within two weeks. Each launch has to reach at least 62 miles and there must be three people or the equivalent weight of three people in the vehicle during the launch.

Teams will be competing for a $10 million purse, which is less than SpaceShipOne cost to build.

Rutan would not say the actual cost of SpaceShipOne, but said that the cost of everything involved in building it was more than $20 million.

SpaceShipOne is not your ordinary spaceship.

“It’s a glider that is dropped off of an airplane at about 50 percent higher than an airliner flies and the glider has a rocket motor … Most of it is this big tank right here, 3000 pounds of laughing gas in there,” said Rutan.

“We spray laughing gas into the motor with rubber and it makes an explosion and that explosion is directed out the back and that gives it enough thrust that it goes to 100 kilometers (above the Earth),” he said.

Kaye LeFebvre, vice president of Scaled Composites, said in a telephone interview that SpaceShipOne stays in space for three to five minutes.

“To re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere the pilot hits a lever that puts it in feather mode,” said LeFebvre.

“That means that the tail goes upward and locks into position and that makes it into a vehicle that has a completely different configuration. It has very high drag. It helps slow the craft down so that when it comes back to Earth it isn’t going at such a horribly high speed,” she said.

LeFebvre said that once SpaceShipOne reaches 60,000 feet the pilot puts it back into the regular glider mode. The vehicle then glides back to Earth and circles for several minutes around the Mojave Airport until it lands.

“SpaceShipOne doesn’t have any power when it’s coming back, so gravity brings it back and the pilot lands it right on the landing strip,” said LeFebvre.

The pilot of SpaceShipOne willnot be revealed until Wednesday.