Burt Rutan famous quotes

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

#Fun #Home #Computer

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

#Mean #Creative #Nonsense

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

#Couple #Smart #Blue

We didn't have practical model rockets in the '50s. The ones we made were very dangerous and the kids that played with them didn't have all their fingers, and sometimes were blind in one eye.
-- Burt Rutan

#Kids #Eye #Rockets

To allow public access to orbit, we would need breakthroughs that would lower the cost by a lot more than an order of magnitude and increase safety by a factor of 100 as compared to every launch system used since the first manned space flight. I think airborne launch will be a significant part of the safety solution.
-- Burt Rutan

#Thinking #Order #Space

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

#Fun #War #Airplane

I drove an electric car for seven years because of its advanced technology, not because I have any concerns about energy resources. I have none at all. And when environmentalists say that global warming is dangerous, unprecedented and that we'll have a tipping point for atmospheric carbon dioxide, it's just nonsense.
-- Burt Rutan

#Technology #Years #Car

By 1931, after a few years' experience of flying scheduled airlines, those planes were operating at roughly 600 times the safety of the space shuttle. I look at safety not in terms of fatalities per passenger-mile, but when you get in and close the door, what is the risk of dying on this flight?
-- Burt Rutan

#Space #Doors #Years

Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.
-- Burt Rutan

#Airplane #Intelligent #Design

I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn't share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked.
-- Burt Rutan

#Smell #Data #Facts

NASA works for the White House. There are many at NASA that wish they were building a modern replacement for the Shuttle. However, they had marching orders to instead work on other things, some of which should have no place in a research organization.
-- Burt Rutan

#White #Order #Organization

NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.
-- Burt Rutan

#Risk #Innovation #Aversion

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

#Taken #Eye #Tired

There is a rampant tendency in any industry where someone is trying to sell something with a bunch of data, where they cherry pick a little bit... bias a little bit. This becomes quite easy when there is an enormous amount of data to cherry pick from.
-- Burt Rutan

#Data #Trying #Littles

There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots.
-- Burt Rutan

#Country #Brother #Airplane

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

#Government #Space #Effort

The criticism is, once I get something flying, I lose interest in it.
-- Burt Rutan

#Flying #Criticism #Interest

Everything looks nonsensical before it works.
-- Burt Rutan

#Looks #Nonsensical

With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.
-- Burt Rutan

#Running #Space #Luck

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

#Technology #Space #Years

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

#Kids #Technology #Phones

We need affordable space travel to inspire our youth, to let them know that they can experience their dreams, can set significant goals and be in a position to lead all of us to future progress in exploration, discovery and fun. Thanks to the X Prize for the inspiration.
-- Burt Rutan

#Dream #Travel #Fun

We'll go back to the moon by not learning anything new.
-- Burt Rutan

#Moon #New Moon

My study is NOT as a climatologist, but from a completely different perspective in which I am an expert … For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data. I became a cynic; My conclusion - 'if someone is aggressively selling a technical product who's merits are dependent on complex experimental data, he is likely lying'. That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.
-- Burt Rutan

#Lying #Airplane #Data

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding
-- Burt Rutan

#Understanding #Testing

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

#Country #Years #Space

Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The smart people dont.
-- Burt Rutan

#Smart #People #Breakthrough

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

#Space #Goal #Safe

I have a hunch the most important reason we're going to space is not known now.
-- Burt Rutan

#Space #Important #Reason

Flight out of the atmosphere is a simple thing to do and should have been available to the public twenty years ago. Ten years from now, we will have space tourism where you will be able to see the black sky and the curvature of the earth. It will be the most exciting roller coaster ride you can buy.
-- Burt Rutan

#Future #Simple #Years

There will be a new industry, and we are just now in the beginning. I will predict that in twelve or fifteen years there will be tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, that fly and see that black sky.
-- Burt Rutan

#Future #Years #Sky

The next 15 years will see thousands of people leave the atmosphere on suborbital flights. My company's SS2 system might fly 100,000 people by 2024. If it is shown to be highly profitable, perhaps we will see 20,000 people traveling to orbit by 2035, and then thousands to the moon by 2050. If we make a courageous decision, like the program we kicked off for Apollo, we will see our grandchildren in outposts on other planets.
-- Burt Rutan

#Future #Grandchildren #Moon

In the coming era of manned space exploration by the private sector, market forces will spur development and yield new, low-cost space technologies. If the history of private aviation is any guide, private development efforts will be safer, too.
-- Burt Rutan

#Technology #Space #Yield

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

#Space #People #Tickets

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

#Years #Design #Various