"It's Mainly Just for Fun"

Space entrepreneur Burt Rutan on how private space flight policy should emphasize innovation, safety—and having a helluva good time

Ted Balaker from the March 2005 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

REASON: 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.

REASON: 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.

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