Posted on 11/20/2004 4:48:39 PM PST by anymouse
A maverick aviator with Elvis-like sideburns, Burt Rutan spread his futuristic vision Friday of space travel no longer dominated by the government but by daring engineers like himself.
Seeking to inspire students, faculty and visitors at the University of California at Los Angeles, Rutan offered a new vision for 21st Century commercial travel--including "spacelines" instead of airlines and resort hotels in orbit--taking average citizens where only handfuls of astronauts have tread thus far.
Dressed in blue jeans and a matching shirt, Rutan called for a new era in aviation, saying risk-taking adventurers like the Wright brothers are needed again to make space tourism a reality in the next few years.
"We haven't had a proper, aggressive space program in this country since 1970," said Rutan, weeks after he and his team made history by flying the first private craft to outer space and back.
Trying to devise spacecraft for tourism will mean trial and error, including crashes of test vehicles, Rutan acknowledged.
"Yeah, there will be smoking holes, but the airplane was made through natural selection," he told about 250 people. "That needs to happen in order to discover the breakthroughs that are out there."
For skeptics who wonder how Rutan's SpaceShipOne entering lower orbits last month translates into lucrative tourism, he noted that the world's earliest aircraft builders never imagined commercial airlines either.
But for that vision to materialize, a new generation of "superheroes" will be needed from today's students and children, to be inspired the way Howard Hughes and Charles Lindbergh were as children during aviation's infancy in the early 1900s, Rutan said.
The payoff would be a breathtaking view of planet Earth, he said, showing slides and videos of how his prototype reached the black void of space this year.
With funding from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Rutan and his Scaled Composites firm developed the spaceship and a launching aircraft that secured the Ansari X Prize in October. It was a $10 million reward for flying the first private manned spacecraft to an altitude exceeding 328,000 feet twice within a 14-day period.
At his company's headquarters in the Mojave Desert, cultural diversions are few and Rutan holds an eccentric reputation as a boss.
When he fills jobs, he said, he doesn't look at classroom grades, but rather for fire in the eyes of his hires. He expects his designers to hold their own on the workshop floor, where designs become real. He wants employees who don't mind "sweating like hell." And he even told one recruit to quit college early because "all he was doing was this liberal [education] sludge."
"I prefer your mind not being poisoned with all this garbage," he said Friday, causing a few to laugh. But a university representative later jokingly reminded students to finish their liberal arts coursework.
"I encourage my people to fail because if they're not failing, they're not going to have a breakthrough," Rutan said.
Perhaps the most provocative slide in his presentation was a chart forecasting the first commercial space travel in three to four years. About 3,000 tourists would become "astronauts" in five years, and within 15 years, suborbital flights would become so affordable that 50,000 passengers will have entered space.
And yes, resort hotels in orbit high above Earth would open in 15 years and become affordable for thousands of guests 25 years from now, Rutan said.
By 2050, spacelines would become so common that passengers "will be bored looking out of a suborbital spaceflight as we do on an airliner," he said.
British businessman Richard Branson has signed a deal with Rutan to begin a spaceline called Virgin Galactic, which would charge $230,000 a person to take a three-hour flight and experience three to four minutes of weightlessness, with a view of the world's curvature.
Even though he said he has "a couple" of contracts with NASA for work unrelated to the space program, Rutan used the U.S. agency again as his whipping boy for what he described as stagnation in space innovation in the past three decades.
Rutan said that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration essentially holds an inefficient monopoly over space travel and is stifling scientific enterprise that could make space travel less costly. The private sector, he contended, will soon provide the technology and aircraft for the sort of spaceflights that had made NASA the standard-bearer in the 1960s.
"There has only been risk-averse, don't-try-that" attitudes, Rutan said. "I'm not sure NASA is going to be a relevant player in suborbital space access."
After his speech, many students told Rutan that they were inspired.
Michael Remington, 29, an aerospace senior who had earlier spent four years in the Navy, said he wanted to make spaceline travel a business career.
"This is the guy I want to emulate because that's what I want to do," Remington said afterward. "It's just exciting."
Exactly. And used there paid for stooges in government to shut him down. And attempted to get Tucker thrown in prison.
I remember seeing that movie.. Too bad..
Unlike Fusion, man-in-space has been well proven. The only barrier is cost. As we get "richer" (and we are, as shown by housing square footage, travel, capabilities of private vehicles) we will be able to afford the existing space systems easier. Simultaneously, space travel will get significantly cheaper.
At some affordability point, you reach critical mass, and the thing explodes. Rutan just thinks it will be soon. I don't know.
One thing to remember. Rutan makes it a point not to tell people what he's going to do. He does it, then tells people what he's done.
This is an important thing in the circles he runs in. There are innumerable people with some fancy design for this airplane or that. Lot's of whack jobs out there.
But Rutan's the real deal. That's why Paul Allen hooked up with him. If Rutan say this stuff will happen (and he knows all the players and what they're up to at the fringe of the military top secret stuff), then I tend to think he might be right. Perhaps exagerating the schedule a bit, but not by much.
There has been a major breakthrough, the cost in space has been a management process problem, not a technology problem. Burt's little spaceshipone blew the old paradigm of big, expensive government access to space out of the water. The money tells the tale and with Branson offering Scaled Composites a 200 million dollar deal to build 5 passenger versions of SS1, we've already reached the point where the era of expensive access to space is rapidly coming to an end.
LOL
SpaceShipOne can only do suborbital missions. Orbital missions are a radically different ballgame in terms of total energy output required from the propulsion system, spacecraft construction requirements due to a high-speed re-entry etc.
BTTT
Again, cheap access to space is a management process problem, not a technology problem, be it orbital, sub-orbital etc.
Yeah, I did some work for them in the preliminary stages of the project...
Jim and my Dad worked together over in Propulsion Test over in the back 40 on-site at JSC...
From what I rememember the CAC folks really screwed the pooch for his project by selling seats on the thing even before it was built...
Those goofy people are on my short list...
I still believe that with some funding Jim's project would work real well...Most of the stuff would be just like Rutan's project being off the shelf items, hardware and software for the flight program is readily available...
And Advents' propulsion would be a lot cleaner than nitrous oxide and tire rubber...
The only engineering problem I rememeber that had to be addressed, was the stress on the vehicle due to the concussive effects of an underwater engine start and the bubble created from that engine start...Everything else was just an exersize in optimizing the flight (test) profile...Thats easy...hehehe
Later,
Steve
High speed re-entry issues can and have been addressed by many of these project that were competing for the 10 mill...
You do not need any re-entry coatings to protect the vehicle if the re-entry flight profile is shallower and slower to begin with...At least from an orbit to ground sense...Not these suborbital fights...Yes they do have some design factors to take the temperatures of high-speed flight in those aspects, but nothing resembling tiles or other ablative coatings that are expensive...
The X-15 project proved this concept...Yes, the vehicle itself was expensive, and expensive to operate...But we gained tons of data to improve even on that design...
Rutan's project proved this...
Think of it like skipping the perfect rock over a pond...
Every hit on the water slowed it down slowly until certain factors like your delta V were effected in ways to allow a controlled decent through the water to the bottom...I know it sounds a bit off, but thats an idea that out there, but could work real well when applied...
You could write a whole book about it, but not here I guess...
Rutan's engineers "feathering" of the wing surface was I feel pure genius...And that wasn't because it was cool to do it like that...It was the only way to do it for that spacecraft design...
Thus the beauty of private corporations getting into this business...
Thats what I like to see...
Integration as a whole was a bit of a hurdle...I think Jim's side of the deal was workable...Rutan's got a tremendous machine of people and facilities...And that is a great thing...
I'm surprised Harry tied you up like that???
I always thought that if it got a little more backing (i.e.: $$$$$$) we could have done some more...We participated knowing that all the good stuff would come in on the backside of the deal...
Like I said, I think the CAC folks really killed a lot of the momentum at a time when the project needed to be taken a bit more seriously...
Rutan is our days' Werner Von Braun. Great visionary.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.