I bet it was a real ‘Once more into the breach’ speach that he gave.
Stand by for dramatic and radical change in the emerging passenger space travel industry—but don’t count on NASA or major aerospace service providers to propel the public into space anytime soon.
Since the early 1970s, NASA seems to mean No Adult Supervision Apparent. The unaffordable space shuttle, for example, is a failure in trying to reduce cost for accessing Earth orbit. Moreover, companies out to build the space agency’s replacement for the shuttle — the Crew Exploration Vehicle — are doing so under an arrangement that cripples innovation, creativity, and the chance for breakthroughs.
Thus says Burt Rutan, the private airplane and spacecraft designer, who is anything but shy when it comes to telling the world where he thinks the United States – and NASA in particular, has gone wrong since the heyday of human spaceflight.
He even offered a few hints as to what SpaceShipTwo will be like
“The ship that we’re developing in our shop right now in Mojave will have a very large cabin,” Rutan explained. A passenger can stand up in that compartment and float up to the ceiling…put their hands out and tumble.
“The windows will have handles on them. If you want to look outside, you’re going to have to go to a window and pull your nose up against it and just look,” Rutan said. “You’re not going to be strapped into seats in a small thing with little windows…if you do that, that spaceliner will not sell the tickets.”
SpaceShipTwo will be “experience optimized,” Rutan said. The suborbital craft will cruise high above Earth, he added, giving passengers a weightless experience and some seven or eight minutes of black sky viewing.
Go! Baby go!
That’s a really tacky title given what happened to the Columbia.
I figured he set himself on fire during a test flight. That, or the NASA administrator kidnapped his daughter and he was forced to seek bloody revenge.
Voyager
November 29, 2005, 6:00pm
4
He was the keynote speaker at a User’s Group meeting I went to earlier this year. The companies of the attendees were lucky he was looking for materials people, not EEs, since I think all of us would have dropped everything and applied to work for him if we were qualified. Maybe the most inspiring speaker I’ve ever heard.
If you ever have a chance to hear him, don’t miss it.
Whaddya mean? Columbia melted and broke apart. There’s a difference.
The bodies that were recovered were very badly burned.
Never mind.
