Blast from the Past: Burt Rutan’s 2006 TED Talk
In February 2006, Burt Rutan trashed NASA and predicted SpaceShipTwo would fly 100,000 passengers to space by 2020.
Well, 306 days to go. Better get moving. Gotta fly only 327 people per day.
Hey Burt, if you’re out there: WTF went wrong?
15 responses to “Blast from the Past: Burt Rutan’s 2006 TED Talk”
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Respect Burt for all he has achieved, but there’s been a whole band of loud-mouths waving arms about private industry and space barnstorming and all, who have gotten precisely nothing to orbit, and barely anything to space.
I’m thinking the industry would be better off without them.
Well if it was truly barnstorming then probably yes it would have been achieved. In those days it was seat of the pants flying and customer beware. No safety regulations, no government oversight. Anyone who could afford a plane could go barn storming.
Not really sure we’ve made ‘progress’ in some ways. ?
Cheers
Neil
Barnstorming was a historical accident. Six thousand planes were built and the govt sold them off as surplus at low costs. People could fly them for the cost of fuel.
It takes years to build space vehicles and a lot of money. You can’t build them in large numbers. Starship and Super Heavy are designed to change that.
Yes, and before 1925 there was no regulation. If you killed yourself and your passenger the government didn’t care, and since the pilots were so poor there was nothing for the lawyers to go after.
Yes, he is is a great designer of airplanes, but rockets are not intended to be airplanes.
If said “loudmouths” have gotten nothing launched, then the industry pretty much is without them. But you don’t seem especially well-inclined toward people who have gotten a lot launched, either. I think your beef is more with private industry than it is with “loudmouths.”
Absolutely not. Private industry got us on the moon in 60ies, largely due to quite healthy competition between different aerospace companies and overall healthy state of the industry and the industrial base.
I am fully convinced that allowing the consolidation wave of 80ies and 90ies to happen has devastated the vitality of that industry, and the new wave of companies do a lot more talking than doing, with a few notable exceptions.
Yes, the consolidation wave has proven disastrous. The defense aerospace industry now looks like Joe Biden as triplets – three senile doddering wrecks.
As for notable exceptions to the all hat, no cattle players in NewSpace, SpaceX is certainly far out in first place. Rocket Lab is sort of SpaceX’s Mini-Me and seems to be coming along well even if “Beck time” anent schedules and ramp-up is getting to be almost as much a thing as “Elon time.” The coming year or so will be make-or-break time for Blue Origin, Firefly, Relativity and some others.
Point is, NewSpace has already stood up two companies with solid prospects and current operations. By the end of next year there could well be three or four more just in the launch space and others in other niches such as Bigelow and Axiom. When the space parts of OldSpace die, as seems inevitable and fairly soon, there will be no shortage of new arrivals to take their places.
Anent the defense parts of OldSpace, the future is more problematical. It would be nice if there was an equally yeasty ferment going on in the private start-up sector that was aircraft- and weapons-oriented, but there isn’t. All one can do is hope some or all the rising NewSpace stars begin to look at the rest of OldSpace’s business and make concerted runs at it as diversification moves.
That is hardly an inevitability, but it’s looking increasingly likely. I think the advent of Space Force is going to get a lot more people in NewSpace looking in that direction. And I think Space Force will be a lot friendlier to new players than USAF has traditionally been. A second Trump term could well be all that is needed to see this nascent trend get up an irreversible head of steam.
Space remained hard, unfortunately. It’s one thing to design a one-off spacecraft to win a prize doing something an X-15 did 50 years ago – a whole other to design something that can do space stuff repeatedly.
Rutan’s outfit was banking on the hybrid-propellant motor. I get the impression they thought they could swap out the engine unit after each flight. Watching the flights in “Black Sky, the Race for Space” the motor produced way too much vibration. Apparently when bigger hybrid motors were built the problem just got worse.
I wonder if they ever considered dropping the hybrid design for something like Xcor’s motors. Xcor at the time was touting its own spaceplane concept.
That would have required a delay of years and tens of millions of dollars as they would have had to redesign SpaceshipTwo to accommodate it. Or wait, it took them years and hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the hybrid didn’t it?
I’ve heard that people recommended a bi-prop liquid engine. Burt wouldn’t hear of it. And the rest is…misery.
Yes, and that’s unfortunate. A captain of a ship has sole authority and responsibility but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t listen to the advice of his officers.
I heard that Tim Pickens was showing Burt videos of rockets and a liquid catoed. That decided Burt permanently. It surprised me that they didn’t use the 12k Kero/LOX thrust chamber for Space Ship One that Tim already owned.
Not from anybody it would seem.