Burt Rutan
Burt Rutan
Elbert Leander "Burt" Rutanis an American aerospace engineer noted for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, energy-efficient aircraft. He designed the record-breaking Voyager, which was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, and the sub-orbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for becoming the first privately funded spacecraft to enter the realm of space twice within a two-week period. With his VariEze design, Rutan is responsible for popularizing the canard configuration...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEngineer
Date of Birth17 June 1943
CityEstacada, OR
CountryUnited States of America
Look at the aerospace industry as it was just after the Kennedy talk. We were hiring like crazy. We were trying to get people graduated from college. Hey, you got to go to the program. We need you.
With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.
To allow public access to orbit, we would need breakthroughs that would lower the cost by a lot more than an order of magnitude and increase safety by a factor of 100 as compared to every launch system used since the first manned space flight. I think airborne launch will be a significant part of the safety solution.
We didn't have practical model rockets in the '50s. The ones we made were very dangerous and the kids that played with them didn't have all their fingers, and sometimes were blind in one eye.
No one knows how to make going to orbit orders of magnitude safer and orders of magnitude more affordable.
Achieving something that has never existed in manned spaceflight and that is high volume and public access.
In the coming era of manned space exploration by the private sector, market forces will spur development and yield new, low-cost space technologies. If the history of private aviation is any guide, private development efforts will be safer, too.
There will be a new industry, and we are just now in the beginning. I will predict that in twelve or fifteen years there will be tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, that fly and see that black sky.
NASA is doing nothing but development. They're not doing research in manned spaceflight at all and I see no reason for them to do that because we already know that it will work and we already know exactly how it will work.
In 12 or 15 years, there will be routine, affordable space tourism not just in the U.S. but in a lot of countries
We'll go back to the moon by not learning anything new.
Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding
It's not good enough for us to have generations of kids that ... look forward to a better version of a cell phone with a video in it. They need to look forward to exploration.
My study is NOT as a climatologist, but from a completely different perspective in which I am an expert … For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data. I became a cynic; My conclusion - 'if someone is aggressively selling a technical product who's merits are dependent on complex experimental data, he is likely lying'. That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.