If Burt Rutan ever read science fiction, he might recognize himself. A strong-willed, technically skilled, maverick spaceship builder with a healthy disdain for bureaucracy and a libertarian streak a mile wide, the 64-year-old Rutan could have stepped from the pages of a Robert Heinlein novel. Rutan first came to fame in 1986 as the revolutionary designer of Voyager, the first airplane to circle the globe nonstop without refueling. No fewer than six Rutan-designed craft are in the Smithsonian’s aerospace collection, including his most famous design to date: SpaceShipOne. In 2004, SpaceShipOne was the first—and so far only—private manned spacecraft to fly above Earth’s atmosphere in a suborbital arc.
Rutan, with his company Scaled Composites, is now trying to capitalize on the success of SpaceShipOne by building SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company founded by another famous maverick, Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic plans to offer well-heeled tourists short suborbital trips into space by 2009. Ticket prices for the ride have been set at $200,000 per passenger, and to date, about 200 people have bought seats.
Looking a little like a futuristic corporate jet, SpaceShipTwo will be almost three times as large as SpaceShipOne, featuring a roomy passenger cabin with seating for six and a two-person cockpit. But the basic design is the same as SpaceShipOne—launched from an airplane, a hybrid solid/liquid–fueled engine will send the spacecraft arcing above the atmosphere. As the craft begins to fall back to Earth, hinged segments of its wings will rotate until they are perpendicular to the rest of the wings, automatically forcing the vehicle into the correct attitude during reentry.
DISCOVER spoke to Burt Rutan about his inspiration for SpaceShipOne, what SpaceShipTwo passengers can expect to get for their money, why the future of spaceflight doesn’t belong to NASA—and the aftermath of a recent explosion at one of Rutan’s test facilities during a test of rocket motor components that killed three people and severely injured three others.
