The space industry’s curmudgeon

The Space Review ^ | 05/08/06 | Jeff Foust

[KevinDavis]

In many fields, elder statesmen—those individuals who have provided a lifetime of service and have made major accomplishments—are often accorded some degree of deference, including when they speak. They often have the freedom to go off the beaten path and make critical statements that would make other speakers—or members of the audience—a bit uncomfortable. Their standing makes them resistant, if not outright impervious, to criticism themselves.

There is, though, a fine line between being a critic and being a curmudgeon: one offers specific assessments, and sometimes proposes solutions, while the other is dismissive of most everything. In his luncheon speech May 4th at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Los Angeles, Scaled Composites CEO Burt Rutan walked a fine line between the two. Over the course of nearly an hour, he took aim at a wide range of targets in the space industry, from NASA to the FAA to other suborbital vehicle developers, leaving people since then to debate both the accuracy and effectiveness of his comments.

[KevinDavis]

[SunkenCiv]

He's under a lot of pressure, trying to make a stretch version of SpaceShipOne that won't come apart during reentry.

[Yo-Yo]

While he didn’t specify what sorts of programs he had in mind, he discussed an example of the types of breakthroughs he was thinking of by comparing the X-15 with SpaceShipOne. While the two vehicles didn’t have identical missions—the X-15 was optimized more for high-speed research—SpaceShipOne in general was much lighter, cheaper, and safer than its predecessor from forty years ago.

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