Two historical aircraft hang from the ceiling at the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum. The little one is a replica of SpaceShipOne and the mothership behind it is the original White Knight One. These two aircraft won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for the first non-government venture to get a human up to space. That paid $10,000,000 USD.
SpaceShipOne is rocket powered and drop launched from 40,000 feet by White Knife One. The rocket flight is powered for just over a minute and the whole flight is under a half hour. The program was funded by Paul Allen who built the amazing museum I am visiting today.
They were designed and built in California by Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites. All flights were from Mojave Airport which is now officially called a spaceport. The original SpaceShipOne is hanging in the National Air And Space Museum in Washington DC. That is how important this achievement was.
The concept of launching parasite aircraft from a mothership has been around for a very long time. I suspect from before the second world war. Several counties had numerous examples of dropship-mothership during the WW2. Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound with his rocket plane "Glamorous Glennis" which also hangs in Washington a few feet away from SpaceShipOne. Chuck's plane dropped from the belly of a B-29 bomber. The advantage of air launching is a major weight savings for the drop vehicle.
After 2004, the concept went on under license with Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic. He built a huge new facility at Mojave and Burt designed a new larger mothership-parasite combination. Their plan was to carry six tourist passengers up to space. That venture is Space Ship Two and White Knight Two. They went on to build swank new launch facility at a spaceport in New Mexico.
Meanwhile, Paul Allen funded the concept to go all the way to an orbital space vehicle. This requires a much larger drop rocket as the altitude for orbit requires a rocket burn of several minutes. The mothership design became the largest aircraft to ever fly in 2019. It is built from scrapping two Boeing 747-200's and using most of the parts. It uses their flight decks, avionics, hydraulics, landing gear, and six of their engines. It can drop a 550,000 pound rocket. That's about a hundred times bigger than SpaceShipOne. It should be possible to get a 13,500 pound satellite into orbit for a fraction of the cost of a surface pad launch. Sadly Paul passed away only a month before the first flight. The billion dollar program then stalled without its benefactor and in 2021 was up for sale at $400,000.