My private tour of Scaled Composites took place in 1988 or 1989. I was working in Lemoore California and was one of the people on the team to help organize the NAS Lemoore Airshow and had traveled to Salinas and several other areas that had reputations for good airshows. If I remember correctly Scaled Composites had a couple of their experimental aircraft at both the Lemoore and Salinas airshow.
One of the pilots I worked with was in the market for his own personal airplane and one weekday we did a training flight down to Mojave and visited there shop to see what they where doing. I dug through some boxes and found some pictures of their facility which I will get scanned and put up on this site. But what was remarkable at that time was they where one of the few facilities in the country outside of the military that where using composite materials. The number of experimental planes they had under construction was the most amazing part of the tour. They may have been experimental but some of them had performance ratings that would have made some third world countries air-forces mouths water.
What I can recall was I walked away pretty impressed who would have thought that this same group would be the ones that be making the first private manned spaceflight. I wish them god speed and hopefully sometime mid monday morning they will have secured the 10 million dollar x-prize. [Scaled Composites]