At 8:01 a.m. on December 14, 1986, the strangest-looking aircraft ever to chase a world record wobbled down the runway at Edwards Air Force Base and lifted into the Mojave sky. The Rutan Voyager, a gossamer creation of graphite, paper, and epoxy resin, carried 7,011 pounds of fuel in seventeen tanks distributed inside its twin booms and forward canard. Its pilots, Dick Rutan—a decorated Vietnam combat pilot and test pilot—and Jeana Yeager, a steely experimental pilot from Texas, planned to circle the Earth without stopping or refueling, a feat many experts deemed impossible. Designer Burt Rutan had sketched the concept on a napkin in 1981; five years later, his team of volunteers had built an aircraft that was half the weight of aluminum but as strong as steel. Disaster nearly struck immediately: the fragile winglets tore off on takeoff, reducing the wingspan but sparing the flight. Over the next nine days, three minutes, and forty-four seconds, Voyager crossed the Pacific through equatorial storms, weathered a ninety-degree thunderstorm bank, and limped through fuel starvation in one engine. The crew navigated from a cockpit the size of a phone booth, subsisting on cold food and short naps. At 8:05 a.m. on December 23, Voyager touched down at Edwards, its tanks nearly dry, having flown 26,000 miles and nearly doubled the previous nonstop, unrefueled record. It was, Dick Rutan declared, “the last first in aviation,” and it won the Collier Trophy and a permanent place in the Smithsonian’s Milestones of Flight gallery.