Rutan: Scaled Composites Growing Quickly

Scaled Composites’ Burt Rutan was in Oshkosh this week, although sans the giant airplane (WhiteKnightTwo) and the human megaphone (Richard Branson) that livened up last year’s AirVenture show.

Rutan had some good news to tell the crowd during a forum. Work on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is proceeding, and his company is actually expanding substantially despite the global recession.

“We’re on the road to develop a system that I expect will have a lot of volume,” he said. “If I come back 10 years from now, I predict that I will get at least 100 of you in this audience to raise your hand. That’s an enormous thing to expect, but I want to go to a resort hotel in orbit sometime in my lifetime. We’re doing what we can do this year to help that happen.”

In fact, Scaled Composites has been growing rapidly, with the company tripling its size during the recession. “But we need more people to build spaceships in the shop and more engineers,” Rutan said. “We will need to increase the size of our company 15 to 20 percent this year.”

Rutan also a few things to say about NASA:

More recently, the government canceled Orion/Ares, a move that Rutan supports. “The biggest problem I had with it is that it used steel-case solid rockets off the shuttle,” he said. “This whole program was developed and designed and laid out specifically…without learning anything new.

“When we went to the moon the first time, we learned a lot of new stuff,” Rutan said. “If we’re spending money to develop a shuttle, we ought to learn something to help us get to Mars.”

Rutan said NASA should give 10 to 15 percent of its budget to new space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX without regulating how to spend the money. “That would allow them to not (have to) beg for commercial investment, while still working in an entrepreneurial mode.”

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