Burt Rutan Quotes

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

Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The smart people dont.

A NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut can't be creative. He has to follow a predetermined detailed checklist written by an engineer and if he gets a little creative he'll never fly again.

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.

A true creator researches how to have confidence in nonsense.

I believe that research, that you can claim that you're doing research only if half of the people, and I'm talking about half of the experts, believe that the goal is impossible.

Everything looks nonsensical before it works.

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding

I have a hunch the most important reason we're going to space is not known now.

Look at the aerospace industry as it was just after the Kennedy talk. We were hiring like crazy. We were trying to get people graduated from college. Hey, you got to go to the program. We need you.

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

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.

Science is not about consensus, and consensus is not science.

I like to call the difference between research and development. Some people use that interchangeably. They'll say R&D. They're two totally different things.

Confidence in nonsense is required.

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

With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.

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.

At various times over 20 years, I did preliminary designs for aircraft like the Stratolaunch. For that whole time I was encouraging us to do something that almost everyone else felt you could not do.

We didn't have practical model rockets in the '50s. The ones we made were very dangerous and the kids that played with them didn't have all their fingers, and sometimes were blind in one eye.

Achieving something that has never existed in manned spaceflight and that is high volume and public access.

The Russians did much bigger space launch vehicles for launching satellites and for getting men in orbit. They did that much sooner than America because America was very good at something else.

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

No one knows how to make going to orbit orders of magnitude safer and orders of magnitude more affordable.

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.