Rutan was the man behind Spaceship One, the first private craft to go into space.
In 2005 he made a guest appearance at IDF to tell delegates that taking risks is good.
Rutan described what he saw as the cautious approach to technology development adopted by state space programmes as effectively a statement of “let’s have no breakthroughs”.
He then said that in the next ten years private enterprise will follow Spaceship One’s lead and develop commercial space flights costing around $15,000.
With private enterprise, Rutan said, the exploitation of space will move forward far more quickly, and the new industry will throw up personalities to inspire future generations of engineers and scientists in the same way as the aviation pioneers at the start of the last century.
“We’re going to see in every country ships built, going for market share,” said Rutan. “among them will be the next generation of heroes. We cannot afford to bore our children.”
Burt Rutan is very inspirational, I had the good fortune to meet his brother, Dick, a few years ago. He was very approachable and shared some interesting insights into the Voyager aircraft development. They both made enormous achievement in aerospace without the Musk hype.
To Infinity and Beyond!
Or something.