Skip to main content

Burt Rutan

csmonitor.com: "Aviation legend and convention-buster Burt Rutan leads the charge among civilians out to claim the point position on manned spaceflight. Will such barnstormers of space supplant NASA?

...To the public at large, Rutan is best known as the creator of Voyager, the willowy plane that hangs in the lobby at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The propeller-driven aircraft made aviation history in 1986, flying nonstop around the world on a single tank of gas.

To aviation enthusiasts, Rutan is renowned for creating designs that marry lightweight materials with sophisticated ideas. His home-built craft have set new standards for speed, distance, and fuel economy.

Now 60, the crusty engineer with the trademark muttonchops is poised to again seize the public imagination by applying his do-it-yourself approach in a quest for space - one that deliberately excludes NASA. And even as Washington dreams - one year after the loss of Columbia - about moon bases and missions to Mars, some experts maintain that it is private individuals like Rutan who will shape the race for the final frontier.

Bankrolled by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, Rutan plans to send three civilian test pilots in a rocket plane to the threshold of space. By making the subor- bital flight to an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles) twice within two weeks, Rutan hopes to win the $10 million X Prize, an international contest created by a group of space enthusiasts eight years ago. The idea was modeled after the contest with a $25,000 purse that spurred pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh to prove in 1927 that it was possible to fly a plane alone across the Atlantic."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

georgelazenby: Rusomaniacal batshittery

Яџѕѕіаиѕ. Yes, I know that spells Ytdzdziais, don't bother me with details. If Тетяіѕ can do it, I can too. "We went up a short incline. This brought us to an ordinary glass door. We knocked. We waited. We waited. We noticed the doorbell. We rang. We waited. Eventually we grew bold and entered. This brought us into a narrow hallway that had all the indications of being nothing more than drywall, veneer and ceiling tile. We said 'Hello....?' No one answered our question. We proceeded down the hallway flanked by doors, unsure as to whether the desire not to surprise someone for the sake of politeness overrode the rudeness of opening a closed door. At an impasse, we kept walking down the hallway, not opening any doors. But, we rapidly became trapped, when we realized that the only way out of this hallway was to open a door. Because it seemed the least likely to be the entrance to an office, bathroom or weird eastern European slave dungeon, we chose the last door the h...

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings : "BallDroppings is an addicting and noisy play-toy. It can also be seen as an emergence game. My brother Marc takes this software seriously as an audio-visual performance instrument. Balls fall from the top of the screen and bounce off the lines you are drawing with the mouse. The balls make a percussive and melodic sound, whose pitch depends on how fast the ball is moving when it hits the line."