Spaceship guru looks over the horizon
Burt Rutan on his SpaceShipTwo plan, his backers and his competitors
 Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP Spaceflight entrepreneur Burt Rutan, shown here during a 2005 speech, says "my bottom line is that we have to have some kind of breakthroughs." |
MOJAVE, Calif. - As you stroll through the desert airport/spaceport here, you don’t see a “Keep Out! Spaceliner Under Construction” sign. On the other hand, there’s a palpable feeling that behind closed hangar doors, the future of public space travel is, indeed, a work in progress — and in good hands.
At Scaled Composites — home of the privately financed and built SpaceShipOne that made a trio of piloted suborbital flights in 2004 under the rubric of Tier 1 — the fabrication of a fleet of passenger-carrying space planes and huge carrier launch planes is under way. This activity is labeled Tier 1b.
Burt Rutan, head of the firm, is chief design maestro leading a spaceliner workforce. While he’s not about to roll out blueprints or show you factory floor hardware, he gave this reporter a squat-down, legs-folded, but relaxing-beanbag-chair interview in his office to discuss the business of public space travel.
“First of all, just because people have kind of discovered ‘Oh, now we can have a personal commercial spaceflight industry’ … that doesn’t mean we can just throw money at the problem and send people to resort hotels in orbit,” Rutan told Space.com.
Rutan admitted that he’s frustrated but committed to building suborbital spaceships.
“I’d love to be working on going to the moon. I’m doing this really because I don’t think I can convince a funder to go out and invest in an orbital system that we’re not sure would work.”
In Rutan’s plotting of things to come, Tier 2 is orbital.
“My bottom line is that we have to have some kind of breakthroughs,” Rutan explained. “What’s needed is to create an environment to have breakthroughs … to try things that may seem illogical at first.”
Long-shot
Looking back on SpaceShipOne, Rutan said the focus was on safety, on recurring cost, and asking the question: “When we’re done with this, if it worked, could it lead right into flying the public? Could it be safe? I don’t think that’s been done to go to orbit,” he said.
While Microsoft mogul Paul Allen bankrolled SpaceShipOne and had a lot of confidence in the effort, Rutan added that the investor confessed later that he did think the suborbital project “was a real long-shot.” (Microsoft is a partner in the MSNBC joint venture.)
“I’m focusing now on going ahead and doing something that I never did with airplanes. That is, not just do research but go ahead and build something that would be certified. Produce it and sell it to spacelines and let them go out there and compete with each other to fly the public,” Rutan said.
His hunch is that by profitably flying people by the tens of thousands, the funding pump will be primed, and the recognition fostered that breakthroughs are needed for a high-risk orbital spaceship research program.
“I’m getting a commercial system going for one reason: I don’t think anybody else will,” Rutan explained. “I think it’s really important for me to build a lot of them,” he added, not just a few for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, “but a lot of them.”
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