Burt Rutan

Elbert "Burt" Rutan is an aerodynamicist and entrepreneur famous for designing and building, among other things, some of the most-produced homebuilt airplanes, the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling, the longest-range airplane ever developed (not the same as the previous entry), and the first privately-developed manned spacecraft. You can read more about him and his career here:
Burt Rutan

One fact that gives some perspective on how much Rutan's done during his career is that five Rutan-designed airplanes currently reside in the National Air and Space Museum. Throughout his career Rutan viciously attacked the status quo in the aerospace industry, possibly the most conservative high-tech industry in modern civilization. Unhappy about the efficiency and performance of light aircraft, he designed the VariEze and Long-EZ, proving that airplanes can achieve the same fuel economy as the most efficient cars on the road while travelling three times as fast. Just to show a skeptical industry it could be done, he directed his company Scaled Composites to build two airplanes capable of flying completely around Earth's circumference on one tank of fuel and a rocketplane capable of taking three people beyond the edge of Earth's atmosphere.

This Monday SpaceShipTwo, the successor to that rocketplane which now hangs next to Yeager's X-1 and Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, flew under her own power past Mach 1 for the first time. The SpaceShipTwo program has suffered numerous delays and a tragic engine-testing accident that claimed three lives in the 8 years since it got underway amid the post-X-Prize euphoria in Mojave. Since the program began, Rutan's influence at Scaled Composites began to wane, and he retired quietly a few years ago. Seeing this new spaceship, which will almost certainly be the first American machine to take people to space since Atlantis's retirement in 2011, in powered flight is a reminder of the long shadow Rutan continues to cast on aviation and space even in retirement. Truth be told, I just have a hard time not being jealous of a guy who made things like this happen, often, over a 30+ year career: