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
I believe that research, that you can claim that you're doing research only if half of the people, and I'm talking about half of the experts, believe that the goal is impossible.
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.
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.
In 12 or 15 years, there will be routine, affordable space tourism not just in the U.S. but in a lot of countries
Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.
A true creator researches how to have confidence in nonsense.
Virgin Galactic, which will be operating SpaceShipTwo, will be only one of several spacelines. The competitors for Virgin include the Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, and possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And likely a couple of others who are smart enough not to tell people what they are doing!
When theres ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was well, thats nonsense! so what that means is that a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.
Just like when early airplanes were flying in 1910, we didn't know what the benefits are, but we were doing it because it was fun.
I really thought he'd start this program, do the conceptual work, and move on. But he's like a kid in a candy store. He's having more fun than he ever has.
If you don't have a consensus that it's nonsense, you don't have a breakthrough.
I think within the next two to three years there will be tickets available for sub-orbital flights,
The ship that we're developing in our shop right now in Mojave will have a very large cabin.