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
Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The smart people dont.
A NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut can't be creative. He has to follow a predetermined detailed checklist written by an engineer and if he gets a little creative he'll never fly again.
Since Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard's epoch flights in 1961, all space missions have been flown only under large, expensive government efforts. By contrast, our program involves a few, dedicated individuals who are focused entirely on making spaceflight affordable.
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!
Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than those first throwaway rockets, even though large portions of it were reusable. It's absurd.
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.
I have a hunch the most important reason we're going to space is not known now.
NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.
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.
We are looking for people that like to build things with their hands and are good craftsman. We need those that give 100-percent each day and enjoy a fast-paced research and development environment.
We believe a proper goal for safety is the record that was achieved during the first five years of commercial scheduled airline service which, while exposing the passengers to high risks by today's standards, was more than 100 times as safe as government manned space flight,
We are not able to hire temporary employees or interns.
Our success proves without question that manned space flight does not require mammoth government expenditures...it can be done by a small company operating with limited resources and a few dozen dedicated employees.
At first, it will be real rich people, hundreds of them flying into suborbital space, ... But what will happen is you'll run out of real rich people real quickly.