Quotes by Burt Rutan

About Burt Rutan:

Elbert Leander "Burt" Rutan is an American aerospace engineer noted for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, energy-efficient aircraft. He designed the record-breaking Voyager, which was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, and the sub-orbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for becoming the first privately funded spacecraft to enter the realm of space twice within a two-week period. With his VariEze design, Rutan is responsible for popularizing the canard configuration and moldless composite construction for homebuilt aircraft.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

By 1931, after a few years' experience of flying scheduled airlines, those planes were operating at roughly 600 times the safety of the space shuttle. I look at safety not in terms of fatalities per passenger-mile, but when you get in and close the d...

Burt Rutan

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.

Burt Rutan

In the coming era of manned space exploration by the private sector, market forces will spur development and yield new, low-cost space technologies. If the history of private aviation is any guide, private development efforts will be safer, too.

Burt Rutan

We didn't know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there.

Burt Rutan

I drove an electric car for seven years because of its advanced technology, not because I have any concerns about energy resources. I have none at all. And when environmentalists say that global warming is dangerous, unprecedented and that we'll have...

Burt Rutan

We need affordable space travel to inspire our youth, to let them know that they can experience their dreams, can set significant goals and be in a position to lead all of us to future progress in exploration, discovery and fun. Thanks to the X Prize...

Burt Rutan

Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tri...

Burt Rutan

It's not good enough for us to have generations of kids that... look forward to a better version of a cell phone with a video in it. They need to look forward to exploration.

Burt Rutan

We'll go back to the moon by not learning anything new.

Burt Rutan

Our goal is to show that you can develop a robust, safe manned space program and do it at an extremely low cost.

Burt Rutan

In 12 or 15 years, there will be routine, affordable space tourism not just in the U.S. but in a lot of countries.

Burt Rutan

There is a rampant tendency in any industry where someone is trying to sell something with a bunch of data, where they cherry pick a little bit... bias a little bit. This becomes quite easy when there is an enormous amount of data to cherry pick from...

Burt Rutan

I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn't share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell ...

Burt Rutan

The criticism is, once I get something flying, I lose interest in it.

Burt Rutan

Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The 'smart' people don't.

Burt Rutan

To allow public access to orbit, we would need breakthroughs that would lower the cost by a lot more than an order of magnitude and increase safety by a factor of 100 as compared to every launch system used since the first manned space flight. I thin...

Burt Rutan

The photographs of space taken by our astronauts have been published all over the place. But the eye is a much more dynamic mechanism than any camera or pictures. It's a more exciting view in person than looking at the photographs. Of course, I perso...

Burt Rutan

Virgin Galactic, which will be operating SpaceShipTwo, will be only one of several spacelines. The competitors for Virgin include the Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, and possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And likely a couple of others who are smart enough ...

Burt Rutan

For the industry we're starting now, for suborbital flight, there is no destination, so the spacecraft you go up in has to be large and spacious. That's why SpaceShipTwo is much bigger than SpaceShipOne: It needs to be because you want those six peop...

Burt Rutan

The most impressive airplane ever, I believe, was designed only a dozen years after the first operational jet. Stayed in service till it was too rusty to fly, taken out of service. We retreated in '98 back to something that was developed in '56. What...

Burt Rutan

Author Bio

  • NameBurt Rutan
  • DescriptionAmerican aerospace engineer
  • BornJune 17, 1943
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAerospace Engineer; Engineer; Aviator; Entrepreneur
  • AwardsPresidential Citizens Medal; Daniel Guggenheim Medal