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Posted on 07/27/2005 1:32:13 PM PDT by Young Werther
British entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, has teamed up with aerospace designer, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to form a new aerospace production company. The new firm will build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Me too. I might have a hard time putting on a space suit that says "Virgin", but I'd still want to fly.
I'm surprised Rutan (or Rutan and Branson) don't / announce a private/ /enterprise verson/ of something . . .
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Hey, those guys must be
Freepers, and were inspired by
our conversation!
I bet no pieces are going to be falling of Burt's spacecraft.
Willl the first craft be operational in time to rescue the shuttle crew?
Burt Rutan is the essence of cool. Someday his VariEze planes will sell for $millions as Stratavarius-level antiques.
Space ping!
Have I mentioned before that I met him when they were building Voyager. I was like this college-kid groupie who used to drive up to the Mojave Airport and sit around schmoozing the volunteer engineers up there working on it.
When his brother Dick flew Voyager in to land at Edwards at the end of its around-the-world-flight, I was the first car through the gates at the AFB at midnight the night before. To this day I can still pick out my 80 Olds Cutlass parked up against the rope line in some of the pictures of that day.
Seeing that NASA are still losing tiles (like my house during a storm) - I think it's time for privately funded space travel.
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I met him at Osh Kosh in 1988 (I think) when he announced the Pond Racer. I think that was his only real failure, and, typically for aerodynamicists, it was due to the engine not performing to spec. What's that old adage? Never put a new engine in a new airframe...
I have a design that would do the same thing that would fulfill the misssion intended, but it would take gobs of cash & I never did finish my aero education, went on to get an EE degree.
http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/rutan2.htm
The Pond Racer was something that a person who had a mission wanted a solution to. His mission was to stop all these guys from destroying a Mustang every year and 12 engines every year at Reno and he wanted new technology in the racers so that it would take over and replace this environment that was destroying war birds. By that standard the project was a failure. You go up to Reno today and they're all warbirds, so his mission and the Pond Racer solution to that failed. One of the reasons that it failed is the airplane never really flew with its propulsion system putting out the power. We didn't crack the nut on providing that 2,000 horsepower propulsion. Now if he did and that airplane ended up beating the warbird -- which it could have if it had had the propulsion working up to the original plan -- then, because of competition, there would have been a lot of new technology engines and new airframes and today, as early as today, I think you would have seen half or the majority of the Reno racers would be not destroying WWII equipment. But the problem is it failed because it didn't win.
I just read Branson's biography. He's an interesting cat, that's for sure.
I'd like to see Rutan's "spacecraft" do more than enter the very margin of what's considered "space", let alone an actual orbit.
Rutan is great, but everybody pretending that he's putting astronauts into orbit is getting out of hand. He (his "spacecraft") flew high, stalled at 60+ miles and glided back to Earth. Pretty cool, but NASA's got 7 astronauts in orbit with deliverable payloads.
thank you good friend
I'm still pissed I'll never get a chance to own one of these
Beech has recalled the leases and bought back as many as they could from the owners. leaving only a few left. The one above is Rutan's, and was the chase plane for his space ship. The graveyard is below.
I always loved the Starship. Why are they being recalled? Are they junk?
I see one take off over my house in Calgary periodically. Nifty sound!
Cheers
Jim
No one ever said it's the same thing. But interms of what he's accomplished per dollar spent, he kicks but all over NASA. No privately funded effort has even come close to this.
Sub-orbital flight is how the US space program began and with a few more bucks, and very little time Burt and Company will be in orbit before you know it.
You do remember that Burt Rutan built the Voyager aircraft, the first to fly around the world without landing or refueling in any way?
You obviously don't remember that the winglets (those little vertical pieces at the tips of the main wings, used to cut drag by interrupting the wingtip vorteces) were ground off when the wingtips scraped on the runway when fully loaded. They dangled and flapped and beat up the wingtips for a good bit of time before finally... wait for it... FALLING OFF.
Bits and pieces fall off of aircraft (and cars and bicycles and washing machines) all the fricking time. The totally unreasonable expectation of perfection by NASA before they can do anything is a totally bizarre and irrational position. It is also increasingly common in the modern "nanny state" mindset we are forced to contend with.
Stuff happens. Get over it. Perfection isn't possible.
You do. You find flaws. You fix them. You do again. If you're smart enough and persistent enough you succeed.
How come NASA and George Bush have to be perfect in all that they do, but the "great society" can have a 40 year record of 100% failure and it just sails happily along?
We will go. We will succeed. We will lose more on the way. It is the price of being alive.
Paul Allen lost at least $10 million on the Rutan's X prize entry. For him that was OK, because it was a hobby. No privately business could long survive that sort of results, though.
Branson may believe he can make a profit on suborbital flights, and maybe he can ... for a while. But the bottom line is that his revenues are going to have to exceed expenses, and that calls for a high volume of tourists willing to pay many thousands for a suborbital flight. I doubt that's sustainable.
One failure, and Branson's out of business, and so is Rutan.
More than a few more bucks -- more like several hundred million, and probably more than a billion. There's a huge difference between suborbital skyrockets and reusable orbital vehicles.
Even supposing that Rutan gets the billion, there's still the problem of finding a market that can cover his start-up costs, much less make a profit.
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