Photos: Aerospace legend Burt Rutan retires

With wife Tonya, Rutan will move to the lakeside city of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from the small desert town of Mojave, which he helped put on the map by designing innovative aircraft and spacecraft for four decades.  (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

British billionaire Richard Branson, left, and Burt Rutan discuss a space launch project at Mojave spaceport in 2008. The plane under discussion would carry an eight-person rocket ship on a flight from Earth to a launch point 48,000 feet up.  (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan, left, and pilot Brian Binnie pop champagne to celebrate the second successful Ansari X Prize spaceflight by the American Mojave Aerospace Ventures team.  (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

The Voyager, flown by Dick Rutan -- Burt Rutan’s older brother -- and Jeana Yeager, comes in for a landing at Mojave airport in July 1986. In December of that year, piloted by Rutan and Yeager, the craft would become the first to fly around the world without refueling.  (Douglas C. Pizac / Associated Press)

Rutan spent more than 45 years working in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles. He was a flight test project engineer for the Air Force from 1965 to 1972 and later founded a company that designed small planes for the home-built market, including the well-known VariEze and Long-EZ aircraft.  (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

“The criticism is, once I get something flying, I lose interest in it,” Burt Rutan says. “I’ve enjoyed the first flight of a new type of aircraft every year I’ve been out here.”  (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)