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At various times over 20 years, I did preliminary designs for aircraft like the Stratolaunch. For that whole time I was encouraging us to do something that almost everyone else felt you could not do.

Burt Rutan

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Burt Rutan
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 17
Aerospace Engineer
Aerospace Engineering
Aircraft Pilot
Astronaut
Engineer
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Estacada
Oregon
Elbert Leander Burt Rutan
Elbert Leander Rutan
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More quotes by Burt Rutan

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Since Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard's epoch flights in 1961, all space missions have been flown only under large, expensive government efforts. By contrast, our program involves a few, dedicated individuals who are focused entirely on making spaceflight affordable.
Burt Rutan
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Within 25 years, virtual reality meetings will be essentially transparent to being there in person. Once we can do this, the idea of climbing into an aircraft, and burning up huge quantities of fossil fuels to propel our bodies and briefcases full of papers, will seem absolutely backward.
Burt Rutan
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Everything looks nonsensical before it works.
Burt Rutan
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I like to call the difference between research and development. Some people use that interchangeably. They'll say R&D. They're two totally different things.
Burt Rutan
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We didn't know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there.
Burt Rutan
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We'll go back to the moon by not learning anything new.
Burt Rutan
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Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding
Burt Rutan
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When you have a transportation system that the price of propellant is essentially negligible something is very wrong. If you look at any other transportation system, a car, a motorcycle, a train, an oil tanker, an airliner, you name it about a quarter to a third of the operating cost is buying the propellant.
Burt Rutan
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I have a hunch the most important reason we're going to space is not known now.
Burt Rutan
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The photographs of space taken by our astronauts have been published all over the place. But the eye is a much more dynamic mechanism than any camera or pictures. It's a more exciting view in person than looking at the photographs. Of course, I personally am sick and tired of hearing people talk like that: I want to see it myself!
Burt Rutan
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When theres ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was 'well, thats nonsense!', so what that means is that a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.
Burt Rutan
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Achieving something that has never existed in manned spaceflight and that is high volume and public access.
Burt Rutan
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I believe that research, that you can claim that you're doing research only if half of the people, and I'm talking about half of the experts, believe that the goal is impossible.
Burt Rutan
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In 12 or 15 years, there will be routine, affordable space tourism not just in the U.S. but in a lot of countries.
Burt Rutan
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I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.
Burt Rutan
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Science is not about consensus, and consensus is not science.
Burt Rutan
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Our goal is to show that you can develop a robust, safe manned space program and do it at an extremely low cost.
Burt Rutan
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Confidence in nonsense is required.
Burt Rutan
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Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The smart people dont.
Burt Rutan
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Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than those first throwaway rockets, even though large portions of it were reusable. It's absurd.
Burt Rutan