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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
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Estacada
Oregon
Elbert Leander Burt 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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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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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
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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 have a hunch the most important reason we're going to space is not known now.
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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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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Everything looks nonsensical before it works.
Burt Rutan
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Virgin Galactic, which will be operating SpaceShipTwo, will be only one of several spacelines. The competitors for Virgin include the Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, and possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And likely a couple of others who are smart enough not to tell people what they are doing!
Burt Rutan
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A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.
Burt Rutan
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Science is not about consensus, and consensus is not science.
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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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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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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It's not good enough for us to have generations of kids that ... look forward to a better version of a cell phone with a video in it. They need to look forward to exploration.
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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Confidence in nonsense is required.
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