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A Nasa-funded Study Estimates That If The Price Of A Ticket To Space Approached $100,000, Close To A Million People Would Buy One. That's A $100 Billion Industry. Microsoft Cofounder Paul Allen Gave Me $20 Million In Startup Funding To Go After That Market.

-Burt Rutan

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A Nasa-funded Study Estimates

Burt Rutan

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A Nasa-funded Study Estimates That If The Price Of A Ticket To Space Approached $100,000, Close To A Million People Would Buy One. That's A $100 Billion Industry. Microsoft Cofounder Paul Allen Gave Me $20 Million In Startup Funding To Go After That Market.

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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.

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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.

The Next 15 Years Will See Thousands Of People Leave The Atmosphere On Suborbital Flights. My Company's Ss2 System Might Fly 100,000 People By 2024. If It Is Shown To Be Highly Profitable, Perhaps We Will See 20,000 People Traveling To Orbit By 2035, And Then Thousands To The Moon By 2050. If We Make A Courageous Decision, Like The Program We Kicked Off For Apollo, We Will See Our Grandchildren In Outposts On Other Planets.

Usually The Wacky People Have The Breakthroughs. The Smart People Dont.

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.

The Photographs Of Space Taken By Our Astronauts Have Been Published All Over The Place. But The Eye Is A Much More Dynamic Mechanism Than Any Camera Or Pictures. It's A More Exciting View In Person Than Looking At The Photographs. Of Course, I Personally Am Sick And Tired Of Hearing People Talk Like That: I Want To See It Myself!

Virgin Galactic, Which Will Be Operating Spaceshiptwo, Will Be Only One Of Several Spacelines. The Competitors For Virgin Include The Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, And Possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And Likely A Couple Of Others Who Are Smart Enough Not To Tell People What They Are Doing!

My Study Is Not As A Climatologist, But From A Completely Different Perspective In Which I Am An Expert … For Decades, As A Professional Experimental Test Engineer, I Have Analyzed Experimental Data And Watched Others Massage And Present Data. I Became A Cynic; My Conclusion - 'if Someone Is Aggressively Selling A Technical Product Who's Merits Are Dependent On Complex Experimental Data, He Is Likely Lying'. That Is True Whether The Product Is An Airplane Or A Carbon Credit.

In 12 Or 15 Years, There Will Be Routine, Affordable Space Tourism Not Just In The U.s. But In A Lot Of Countries.

Within 25 Years, Virtual Reality Meetings Will Be Essentially Transparent To Being There In Person. Once We Can Do This, The Idea Of Climbing Into An Aircraft, And Burning Up Huge Quantities Of Fossil Fuels To Propel Our Bodies And Briefcases Full Of Papers, Will Seem Absolutely Backward.

When Theres Ever A Breakthrough, A True Breakthrough, You Can Go Back And Find A Time Period When The Consensus Was 'well, Thats Nonsense!', So What That Means Is That A True Creative Researcher Has To Have Confidence In Nonsense.

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.

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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.

Research And Development

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The Criticism Is, Once I Get Something Flying, I Lose Interest In It.

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Confidence In Nonsense Is Required.

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Everything Looks Nonsensical Before It Works.

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A True Creator Researches How To Have Confidence In Nonsense.

Have Confidence

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No One Knows How To Make Going To Orbit Orders Of Magnitude Safer And Orders Of Magnitude More Affordable.

A Nasa-funded Study Estimates That If The Price Of A Ticket To Space Approached $100,000, Close To A Million People Would Buy One. That's A $100 Billion Industry. Microsoft Cofounder Paul Allen Gave Me $20 Million In Startup Funding To Go After That Market.

Testing Leads To Failure, And Failure Leads To Understanding

Testing Yourself

In The Coming Era Of Manned Space Exploration By The Private Sector, Market Forces Will Spur Development And Yield New, Low-cost Space Technologies. If The History Of Private Aviation Is Any Guide, Private Development Efforts Will Be Safer, Too.

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