Spaceship guru looks over the horizon Burt Rutan on his SpaceShipTwo plan, his backers and his competitors
By Leonard David Senior space writer Space.com Updated: 12:28 a.m. CT Aug 12, 2006 URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14312240/ MOJAVE, Calif. - As you stroll through the desert airport/spaceport here, you dont see a Keep Out! Spaceliner Under Construction sign. On the other hand, theres a palpable feeling that behind closed hangar doors, the future of public space travel is, indeed, a work in progress and in good hands. At Scaled Composites home of the privately financed and built SpaceShipOne that made a trio of piloted suborbital flights in 2004 under the rubric of Tier 1 the fabrication of a fleet of passenger-carrying space planes and huge carrier launch planes is under way. This activity is labeled Tier 1b. Burt Rutan, head of the firm, is chief design maestro leading a spaceliner workforce. While hes not about to roll out blueprints or show you factory floor hardware, he gave this reporter a squat-down, legs-folded, but relaxing-beanbag-chair interview in his office to discuss the business of public space travel. First of all, just because people have kind of discovered Oh, now we can have a personal commercial spaceflight industry that doesnt mean we can just throw money at the problem and send people to resort hotels in orbit, Rutan told Space.com. Rutan admitted that hes frustrated but committed to building suborbital spaceships. Id love to be working on going to the moon. Im doing this really because I dont think I can convince a funder to go out and invest in an orbital system that were not sure would work. In Rutans plotting of things to come, Tier 2 is orbital. My bottom line is that we have to have some kind of breakthroughs, Rutan explained. Whats needed is to create an environment to have breakthroughs to try things that may seem illogical at first. Long-shot Looking back on SpaceShipOne, Rutan said the focus was on safety, on recurring cost, and asking the question: When were done with this, if it worked, could it lead right into flying the public? Could it be safe? I dont think thats been done to go to orbit, he said. While Microsoft mogul Paul Allen bankrolled SpaceShipOne and had a lot of confidence in the effort, Rutan added that the investor confessed later that he did think the suborbital project was a real long-shot. (Microsoft is a partner in the MSNBC joint venture.) Im focusing now on going ahead and doing something that I never did with airplanes. That is, not just do research but go ahead and build something that would be certified. Produce it and sell it to spacelines and let them go out there and compete with each other to fly the public, Rutan said. His hunch is that by profitably flying people by the tens of thousands, the funding pump will be primed, and the recognition fostered that breakthroughs are needed for a high-risk orbital spaceship research program. Im getting a commercial system going for one reason: I dont think anybody else will, Rutan explained. I think its really important for me to build a lot of them, he added, not just a few for Sir Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic, but a lot of them. Must have checklist In building the multipassenger SpaceShipTwo, Rutan offered a design glimpse of whats in store for ticket-paying suborbital travelers. Along with lots of windows, a close second on the must have checklist is for customers to experience weightlessness. A person in SpaceShipTwo will feel just four minutes of freefall, so having a great big cabin is extremely important, Rutan pointed out, to be able to stretch out your arms and legs and float around. To gain some think space about weightlessness, Rutan took his own fact-finding flight aboard the private Zero Gravity Corp.s aircraft. The impression you get is that its important to know why youre floating, so you need windows. You want to fly you dont want to be strapped in. And to experience weightlessness in shirtsleeves is important, not being bothered with a pressure suit or tied down to a cable or having a helmet on, he said. Mega-mothership Given SpaceShipTwos flight path to the edge of space and back, the four minutes of freefall gives you a feeling for what it would be like to live in orbit for weeks, Rutan suggested. Coming back into the atmosphere, he said, passengers would float gently to the crafts floor as it takes more than 40 seconds to reach one-gravity. Thats the reason we feel well easily be able to certify people floating around and getting into a seat more of a bed to lay flat, Rutan said. Hauling a SpaceShipTwo into launch position will require use of a mega-mothership thats patterned after the White Knight aircraft utilized for the Tier 1 program. That giant airplane will have an identical cabin like that built into SpaceShipTwo. You can take up people and float them out of their chairs. They cant tell they are not in the spaceship, Rutan said. The mothership will be an aerobatic airplane, Rutan said, able to provide rehearsal runs that produce seconds of weightlessness for future suborbital space travelers, as well as offer a view of the dark blue sky at 50,000 feet (15 kilometers). They can practice floating around, playing games, and to get into their positions for re-entry and deceleration. Well be able to give them the entire re-entry G profile, and I think thats extremely important, Rutan noted. So weve got something here that I think is very special. Natural selection Branson has on order a fleet of spaceliners. But there were other offers before Bransons investment proposal was picked, Rutan confided. He was selected as an investment source because he was very early telling everybody what he was going to do, and usually Im against that. But hes putting his reputation on the goal of this program doing that on day one. Rutan said that his biggest concern was investment money getting chicken on the courage to take risk and to move forward to tackle issues. I felt that Branson was making commitments so that he, even without me, had to finish it, he said. Taking a long look out to the next 10 to 12 years, Rutan predicted that theres going to be some very good news and some very bad news. The bad news, Rutan advised, is related to the government space programs. I hate to say that, but the reason is that they are just structured so there will be a lot of money spent and they are not likely to reap the benefits that are going to help us. The good news, Rutan suggested as a guess, is that there will be breakthroughs forthcoming, stemming from what happens after the first generation of suborbital craft including competitors, now known and yet unknown take to the sky. We need what amounts to natural selection to work. Nobody is smart enough to know ahead of time whether something is the right answer. Youve got to field the good ones and bad ones for the good ones to float to the top, Rutan said. URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14312240/ ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
