Words matter. These are the best Burt Rutan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
We didn’t know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there.
In 12 or 15 years, there will be routine, affordable space tourism not just in the U.S. but in a lot of countries.
Tragically, policymakers have thrown horrendous amounts of taxpayer money needed for other purposes at solving an unsubstantiated emergency. It is scandalous that so many climate scientists who fully knew that Al Gore had no basis for his irresponsible claims stood mute.
Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The ‘smart’ people don’t.
We’ll go back to the moon by not learning anything new.
We need affordable space travel to inspire our youth, to let them know that they can experience their dreams, can set significant goals and be in a position to lead all of us to future progress in exploration, discovery and fun. Thanks to the X Prize for the inspiration.
At various times over 20 years, I did preliminary designs for aircraft like the Stratolaunch. For that whole time I was encouraging us to do something that almost everyone else felt you could not do.
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.
A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That’s a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.
I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.
I drove an electric car for seven years because of its advanced technology, not because I have any concerns about energy resources. I have none at all. And when environmentalists say that global warming is dangerous, unprecedented and that we’ll have a tipping point for atmospheric carbon dioxide, it’s just nonsense.
The criticism is, once I get something flying, I lose interest in it.
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.
Our goal is to show that you can develop a robust, safe manned space program and do it at an extremely low cost.
By 1931, after a few years’ experience of flying scheduled airlines, those planes were operating at roughly 600 times the safety of the space shuttle. I look at safety not in terms of fatalities per passenger-mile, but when you get in and close the door, what is the risk of dying on this flight?
I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn’t share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked.
