NASA works for the White House. There are many at NASA that wish they were building a modern replacement for the Shuttle. However, they had marching orders to instead work on other things, some of which should have no place in a research organization. Burt Rutan Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked. Burt Rutan Read Quote
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 think airborne launch will be a significant part of the safety solution. Burt Rutan Read Quote
By 1973, we had a space station, the Skylab, and we had multiple probes going up to planets. So, all this wonderful stuff happened in 10 to 15 years. About that time, there should have been enormous initiatives to make it affordable for people to fly in space, not just a handful of trained NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts. Burt Rutan Read Quote
Tragically, policymakers have thrown horrendous amounts of taxpayer money needed for other purposes at solving an unsubstantiated emergency. It is scandalous that so many climate scientists who fully knew that Al Gore had no basis for his irresponsible claims stood mute. Burt Rutan Read Quote
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 tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don’t try that again. Burt Rutan Read Quote
NASA’s myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation. Burt Rutan Read Quote
