Burt Rutan: It's Mainly Just for Fun
FYI,
"It's Mainly Just for Fun"
Reason Magazine
http://www.reason.com/hod/tb033105.shtml
: Space entrepreneur Burt Rutan on how private space flight policy
: should emphasize innovation, safety—and having a helluva good time
: Lots of hard work. Big burst of publicity. Lots of hard work.
: That's been the pattern for Burt Rutan.
: He is the model of persistent performance, averaging more than one
: new aircraft design per year for over 30 years. Then, last
: October 4, Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites grabbed the
: world's attention. They became the first private operation to send
: a man into suborbital space twice within two weeks, using the same
: vehicle. Rutan and company nabbed the $10 million Ansari X-Prize,
: and proved that entrepreneurial creativity could extend beyond the
: Earth's atmosphere. Now it'll take more hard work—both scientific
: and political—to make space tourism a reality.
: TB: After the X-Prize you enjoyed a huge amount of media attention.
: Do you think this burst of positive publicity will help improve the
: regulatory climate in which the private space flight industry
: operates?
: BR: Well, first of all we're working the regulatory climate very
: hard. We just had a two and a half hour meeting with an FAA
: administrator a couple of weeks ago, and we have a very specific
: regulatory plan for this new industry that we call private space
: flight. And it's a very specific plan on what's appropriate for,
: not just research testing, but also for the certification of things
: that will fly ticket-buying passengers.
: I think that it is good that the public know what's going on. For
: example, FAA is having difficulty staffing their airplane
: certification staff with their budgets now, and for them to build
: additional staff to certify, not just airplanes but spaceliners,
: that's going to need, I think, public support in order to help
: their funding for this. So I think in general if you look back
: before May of last year, even though we developed some 36 different
: manned airplanes, we had never invited the press and the public to
: a research test flight. But starting in May of last year we had
: CNN, and we had print media out for one of our test flights. And
: then of course the big one was June 21st for the first manned
: private space flight where we invited the world's press and we had
: hundreds of print and broadcast media, and I think some
: 90 broadcast media video cameras.
: BR: Oh yeah, and the fact that we filmed in house for two and a
: half years and then made the deal with Discovery. They did a very
: good job with Black Sky.
: That people know that they have a one in 10 chance of dying by
: doing this and they still want to do it anyway, I'm the first one
: to say, hey, let them. However, I don't feel that that's the right
: thing to develop and sustain [for] a private space flight industry.
: Our goals are much more aggressive than that. Our goals are to have
: the same level of safety that the early airliners enjoyed, and a
: lot of people don't realize, but those early airliners 1927, 28,
: 29, 1930, 31, and so on, those were the first regularly scheduled
: commercial airliners. They were dangerous as hell compared to
: airlines today, however they were a hundred times safer than all of
: manned space flight. Not 10 times, 100 times safer.
: We strongly feel that the biggest problem is the safety problem,
: not the affordability problem. If you fly dozens of people every
: day, you'll get affordability with almost any kind of system. The
: safety problem is the biggie, and that's why we think the most
: significant thing that came out of the SpaceShipOne program was not
: just showing that the little guy can fly above a hundred
: kilometers, without government assistance, and government
: technology, and government funds.
: TB: For those interested in space policy, it seems like there were
: two camps when the question was—what's the biggest barrier to
: private space exploration? Some people said it was a regulatory,
: government-imposed barrier, and others said it was a perception
: barrier, that people could not imagine a small group of people
: doing what you did. How do you see it?
: So they can't sit down and write regulatory rules for things that
: will happen in the future because you can't know what's going to
: happen in the future.
: I have a solution for that, and that's what I'm working on right
: now. The developer himself [should] define the testing that is
: needed for his system to show that it is safe, and he negotiates
: that test plan with the FAA, and they approve the fact that he did
: it. I think that it's the only way to do it. You can't regulate
: spaceships like you can airplanes because every one of them is
: different.
: TB: Let's talk about the possible job creation effect of the
: private space flight industry. Because you look at, for example,
: the Wright brothers. They couldn't have anticipated professions
: like airport manager or flight attendant, and yet today the
: aviation industry employs millions of Americans.
: BR: When people think of the Wright brothers they think of 1903. I
: think a more important thing to look at when you make the point
: you're making is 1908 to 1911, early 1912. We're talking about only
: a three and a half year time period that started when only
: 10 people had flown, and ended three and a half years later when
: thousands of pilots flew hundreds of airplanes in 39 countries.
: Those people were doing it just for fun because they weren't
: developing airliners yet, developing the World War I airplanes yet,
: or even the mail planes yet. What happened later were the
: applications, but people wanted to fly. People the world around
: wanted to fly with a barnstormer, people wanted to go to air shows
: and see them do loop-the-loop. You know, this is all kind of fun.
: Go back to 1977 when you could first buy an Apple computer. This
: was a big deal that people could have computers, but the personal
: computer was mainly for fun. Most people used them for games, and
: balancing our checkbook with a personal computer really wasn't why
: we bought personal computers. I mean, people said, well that's why
: we need them, but if you think about it, until we had the Internet,
: we didn't know what computers were really for. Now it's our
: communication, it's our commerce, it's our—everything.
: I like to think that's what suborbital space tourism is; it's going
: to be a big industry. Just like personal computers. But it's mainly
: just for fun.
: You've got to have thousands, tens of thousands, of people enjoying
: it in order to figure out what to do with it. We never would have
: invented the use of the Internet, the communication, and the
: commerce, and everything if you had just a few dozen people with
: computers. So I look at this suborbital phase that we'll go
: through, and I think we'll always have suborbital space flight, but
: I think the main thing is, is that people are going to flat enjoy
: it. And it's going to be absolutely thrilling. They're going to be
: floating their bodies around big cabins. It's not going to be just
: like the SpaceShipOne flights. There's going to be a lot more
: things you can do for the experience.
: To answer your question, I think it's going to be a huge industry.
: And it's going to be competitive very early in the game, and ticket
: sales will come down to the point where hundreds of thousands of
: people will fly.
: TB: And I think the concept of fun you mentioned is hugely
: important and at NASA it's very different—they can't justify
: something on the basis of fun.
: BR: No, and they don't understand the concept of taking risks in
: order to find breakthroughs. I hate to say that because we send
: billions to them for what we think is research but they don't do
: research, they only do development. They won't reach out and look
: for new concepts.
: The same thing is happening with this Bush initiative, the Crew
: Exploration Vehicle. NASA's going to award multi-billion dollar
: contracts in September for the primes, and the primes are going to
: go out and they're going to fight to make sure that they win the
: next phase after spending billions, and because of that, they're
: not going to try new, innovative stuff. They're just going to just
: build some new capsules, and they're going to get launched by
: expendable boosters, and they won't go out and solve the safety
: problems that are preventing us from having resort hotels in orbit.
--
Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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