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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.

-Burt Rutan

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When Theres Ever A

Burt Rutan

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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.

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By 1931, After A Few Years' Experience Of Flying Scheduled Airlines, Those Planes Were Operating At Roughly 600 Times The Safety Of The Space Shuttle. I Look At Safety Not In Terms Of Fatalities Per Passenger-mile, But When You Get In And Close The Door, What Is The Risk Of Dying On This Flight?

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

Nasa Is Doing Nothing But Development. They're Not Doing Research In Manned Spaceflight At All And I See No Reason For Them To Do That Because We Already Know That It Will Work And We Already Know Exactly How It Will Work.

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.

When You Have A Transportation System That The Price Of Propellant Is Essentially Negligible Something Is Very Wrong. If You Look At Any Other Transportation System, A Car, A Motorcycle, A Train, An Oil Tanker, An Airliner, You Name It; About A Quarter To A Third Of The Operating Cost Is Buying The Propellant.

I Have A Hunch The Most Important Reason We're Going To Space Is Not Known Now.

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.

Since Yuri Gagarin And Al Shepard's Epoch Flights In 1961, All Space Missions Have Been Flown Only Under Large, Expensive Government Efforts. By Contrast, Our Program Involves A Few, Dedicated Individuals Who Are Focused Entirely On Making Spaceflight Affordable.

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Everything Looks Nonsensical Before It Works.

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

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.

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.

Achieving Something That Has Never Existed In Manned Spaceflight And That Is High Volume And Public Access.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Science Is Not About Consensus, And Consensus Is Not Science.

Confidence In Nonsense Is Required.

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!

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

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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There Was A Wonderful Little Short Four-year Time Period When Marvelous Things Happened. It Started In 1908, When The Wright Brothers Flew In Paris, And Everybody Said, 'ooh, Hey, I Can Do That.' There's Only A Few People That Have Flown In Early 1908. In Four Years, 39 Countries Had Hundreds Of Airplanes, Thousands Of Pilots.

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!

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

I Don't See Anything Beneficial About The Us Spending 100 Billion Dollars To Go Back To The Moon Unless We Learn Something New That Will Help Us Go To The Moons Of Saturn Okay And So We Ought To Use That To Breed New Breakthroughs And To Test New Breakthroughs And To Fund It.

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We'll Go Back To The Moon By Not Learning Anything New.

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

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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.

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.

Testing Leads To Failure, And Failure Leads To Understanding

Testing Yourself

A True Creator Researches How To Have Confidence In Nonsense.

Have Confidence

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.

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