If Burt Rutan ever read science fiction, he might recognize himself. A strong-willed, technically skilled, maverick spaceship builder with a healthy disdain for bureaucracy and a libertarian streak a mile wide, the 64-year-old Rutan could have stepped from the pages of a Robert Heinlein novel. Rutan first came to fame in 1986 as the revolutionary designer of Voyager, the first airplane to circle the globe nonstop without refueling. No fewer than six Rutan-designed craft are in the Smithsonian’s aerospace collection, including his most famous design to date: SpaceShipOne. In 2004, SpaceShipOne was the first—and so far only—private manned spacecraft to fly above Earth’s atmosphere in a suborbital arc.
Rutan, with his company Scaled Composites, is now trying to capitalize on the success of SpaceShipOne by building SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company founded by another famous maverick, Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic plans to offer well-heeled tourists short suborbital trips into space by 2009. Ticket prices for the ride have been set at $200,000 per passenger, and to date, about 200 people have bought seats.
Looking a little like a futuristic corporate jet, SpaceShipTwo will be almost three times as large as SpaceShipOne, featuring a roomy passenger cabin with seating for six and a two-person cockpit. But the basic design is the same as SpaceShipOne—launched from an airplane, a hybrid solid/liquid–fueled engine will send the spacecraft arcing above the atmosphere. As the craft begins to fall back to Earth, hinged segments of its wings will rotate until they are perpendicular to the rest of the wings, automatically forcing the vehicle into the correct attitude during reentry.
DISCOVER spoke to Burt Rutan about his inspiration for SpaceShipOne, what SpaceShipTwo passengers can expect to get for their money, why the future of spaceflight doesn’t belong to NASA—and the aftermath of a recent explosion at one of Rutan’s test facilities during a test of rocket motor components that killed three people and severely injured three others.
SpaceShipOne is different from any other spacecraft ever flown. How did you come up with the design?
I was working at Edwards [Air Force Base in California] when [test pilot] Mike Adams was killed flying the X-15 there. He had instrument confusion and didn’t line the vehicle up straight during reentry, and it broke up. I focused on that because if we’re going to be flying members of the public, we need a generic solution to that sort of accident.
What is the future of NASA, given the rise of the private space travel industry?
NASA is using government money to try to do several things at once. It is trying to keep the shuttle flying, and every time it has an accident, it adds thousands more engineers and programmers who do more and more work. The more you fly, the more man-hours it takes to fly, rather than less. At the same time, NASA is trying to go out and develop something that can service the space station and also go to the moon and to Mars. This means we have a whole new generation of designers at NASA who are precluded from going out and looking for breakthroughs. They are forced into building a shuttle replacement using hardware from the ’60s and ’70s. They are using for the second-stage rocket engine essentially the same engine that was on the Saturn [upper stages], which is a very low-tech steel-cased engine. They do this because it would cost more to go out and invent something new, because to invent something new you have to try things that you don’t know will work. They worry that if things don’t work, Congress and the taxpayers may look at a failure as a waste of taxpayers’ money rather than a normal thing that happens when you are doing research. That’s why I don’t feel inappropriate in pronouncing NASA naysay, because they are forced to do that.
Sometimes it seems as if NASA doesn’t do anything right. Do you feel that way?
No, no. NASA does hundreds of wonderful things. They send robots all over the solar system. They have scientists doing all kinds of stuff. Some of it is good work. The stuff that JPL [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California] does is fabulous work.
People think I’m a NASA critic. That’s not true. I’m just saying what they are doing on [the manned space program] is not looking for the breakthroughs that are needed. The breakthroughs are likely to come from folks who go out and try some new stuff.
But I have a tremendous amount of respect for what JPL does. NASA did some phenomenal research during the 1960s in response to [Yuri] Gagarin [the first cosmonaut], and very quickly we were driving cars and playing golf on the moon. That is something that made me very proud to be an American who sent taxpayer funds to that NASA.
