Posted on 02/25/2007 6:28:26 PM PST by KevinDavis
Burt Rutan, the iconoclastic aerospace designer behind Virgin Galactic's fleet of suborbital spaceships, is fond of saying that NASA (or "Naysay," as he jokingly pronounces it) stands for "No Adult Supervision Apparent." His California-based company, Scaled Composites, and the Virgin Galactic team have been cast as nimble mammals, running rings around the dinosaurs of the traditional space establishment. Was there ever an instance of mammals and dinosaurs helping each other out? Well, in the space business there is: Today NASA announced an agreement with Virgin Galactic to collaborate on items ranging from spacesuits to spaceships.
NASA's news release said a memorandum of understanding called for the agency's Ames Research Center to work together with Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, to "explore possible collaborations in several technical areas, including hybrid rocket motors and hypersonic vehicles capable of traveling five or more times the speed of sound, employing NASA Ames' unique capabilities and world-class facilities."
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com ...
Great! Branson needs my tax money.
Cool. Another Burt Rutan thread. The guy single-handedly transformed general aviation. And the title of this thread reminds me of Velikovsky's book, "Worlds in Collision".
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