Rutan was encouraged to build his own spaceship by the history of airplane design itself. Five years after the Wright brothers' first flight in 1903, the airplane was still just a dangerous curiosity. Only a dozen or so people had tried flying in an airplane. Yet by 1912 hundreds of pilots had flown airplanes of different designs that were developed through private enterprise. The bad designs crashed; the good designs flew. Soon factories in France, England, and Germany were producing hundreds, and then thousands, of airplanes a year. "Why? I believe the answer lay in two observations: 'That's gotta be fun'and 'Maybe I can do that,"' says Rutan.