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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Burt is one of us

I just ran across this quote of Burt Rutan from this afternoon on Space Flight Now:

“Quite frankly, I think the big guys, the Boeings, the Lockheeds, the nay-say people at Houston, they probably … think we’re a bunch of home builders who put a rocket in a Long Easy,” he said, referring to one of his recreational aircraft designs. “But if they … got a look at how this flight was run and how we developed the capabilities of this ship and showed its safety, I think they’re looking at each other now and saying, ‘We’re screwed.'”

Yes, I do believe the pigs had their noses so deep in the trough they never saw the hatchet coming. If any of them did look up they just grunted at the idea anyone could possibly ever displace them, not realizing they were not being so much displaced as bypassed and made redundant to requirements.

I love the smell of bacon in the morning. It smells of… liberty.

11 comments to Burt is one of us

  • T. J. Madison

    Don’t worry, THE STATE will be back. I’m sure the NASA and DoD guys will get busy trying to restict/heavily tax/regulate/ban this new behavior as quickly as possible. In the name of National Security, most likely.

    The key question now is, can Burt and others get mobile enough to conduct operations out of reach of the USG? The DoD is all about dominance of space, so I’m not sure simple rebasing will be enough.

  • Dale Amon

    Hell, I’m not much worried about the DOD. The USAF guys will be all over the place wanting to fly one. They and DARPA have already tossed contracts to the Mojave companies and that has helped them a lot.

    The ones to worry about are Boeing and Lockmart. They have huge bucks behind lobbyists who buy congressmen to look after their interests. There is absolutely nothing in there about a desire for stopping people from doing things. It’s pure business, the Iron Triangle of NASA (My Center is Bigger than Your Center), the Aerospace Ministry (the big aerospace company’s) and Congress (Pork for the Boys).

    That’s why we keep ourselves dug deeply into the Beltway so we can spike these sorts of things when they happen.

    ‘We’ have got a very good deal out of DC on regulatory rules, about as good as one could hope for. Spaceships are not under normal FAA Certification (which would make commercial spaceflight impossible for decades); it is under another regime which basically says: Go forth and fly, so long as you prove you have enough insurance to cover the worst case ground damage from the impact of you and your passenger’s flaming body parts with the ground, and proof that the passengers understood this before flying’.

    That is not an unreasonable regime.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    This is a very great day for aviation and another poke in the eye to the naysayers. Great stuff.

  • You caught that too, huh? My favourite quote in an afternoon of great quotes! Nasa and Co. really need a rocket (hah!) to be shoved up their collective tailpipe, and Burt seems to be just the man to do it.

    Here’s hoping…

  • Daveon

    and proof that the passengers understood this before flying’.

    Aye, and here lies the rub. I greatly fear that the estate of the first “serious” player to fly and be killed would probably destroy any such attempt to prove that in a caught in a matter of days.

    While all the excitment about this is great, it’s not an orbital flight, and the problems about doing that remain huge. I’ll be wearing my skeptics hat for a long time.

  • Dale Amon

    Just remember to take the hat off now and again because 4-6 years is a long time to keep a hat on. 😉

  • Being wary of the Big Boys is always a prudent idea. However you might have noticed that Darleene Druyan was just sentenced to 9 months in the slammer (maybe with Martha Stewart) for illegal hankey pankey with Boeing.

    The BBs are not in a good positin right now to launch any sort of offensive against the minnows, They have to fight off the Eurotrash (EADS & Thales) trying to but into the DoD procurement business.

    I suspect that twenty years from now one of these minnows will be the new microsoft. Remember in the 1980s when France and Japan were obsessed with beating IBM, only to find that the real value had migrated elsewhere?

  • Marcus Lindroos

    > The ones to worry about are Boeing and Lockmart.
    > They have huge bucks behind lobbyists who buy
    > congressmen to look after their interests. There is
    > absolutely nothing in there about a desire for
    > stopping people from doing things. It’s pure business,

    Dale, if you understand you correctly, you’re saying Boeing and Lockheed-Martin would prefer to shut down the emerging suborbital space tourism business? Why would they do that?

    These guys are staying out for a simple reason: their internal space tourism business assessments indicate the numbers just don’t add up. Now, if Rutan & co. proves them wrong, they can always jump on the bandwagon later.

    BTW, Boeing wasn’t the first company to build commercial civil transport aircraft or jetliners. In the commercial aerospace business, not being first has traditionally paid off (witness the eventual failure of the Comet jetliner in the early 1950s, for example).

    MARCU$

  • Ken

    “‘We’ have got a very good deal out of DC on regulatory rules, about as good as one could hope for. Spaceships are not under normal FAA Certification (which would make commercial spaceflight impossible for decades); it is under another regime which basically says: Go forth and fly, so long as you prove you have enough insurance to cover the worst case ground damage from the impact of you and your passenger’s flaming body parts with the ground, and proof that the passengers understood this before flying’.”

    Damn, if aircraft had been under that regime all along, the damnable groundcar would have been in the museum for the past 30 years.

  • Daveon

    Don’t worry Dale, I’ll let the air cool my brain from time to time, but I’m, not for the first time, with Marcus on this.

    I’ve not finished “fisking” yet, but the Futron report is looking every bit as light weight as I was afraid it would. I’ll probably post it on my Atomicrazor.com blog, but I’ll probably avoid the flamming pit that sci.space.policy is now.

  • Burt is a Certifiable Mad Genius, except he’s not insane. In my book he ranks right up there with Glenn Curtiss, Igor Sikorsky, Howard Hughes, Paul Macready, Kelly Johnson, Paul Poberenzy, and Steve Wittman.