When there's ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was 'well, that's nonsense!' so what that means is that a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense. — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
The most impressive airplane ever, I believe, was designed only a dozen years after the first operational jet. Stayed in service till it was too rusty to fly, taken out of service. We retreated in '98 back to something that… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
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. — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
America was good enough to make a small compact lighter weight nuclear weapon. The Russians still had these big clunky heavy ones, so they… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
Flight out of the atmosphere is a simple thing to do and should have been available to the public twenty years ago. Ten years… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
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… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
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,… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
Within 25 years, virtual reality meetings will be essentially transparent to being there in person. Once we can do this, the idea of climbing… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
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… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
Achieving something that has never existed in manned spaceflight and that is high volume and public access. — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
There will be a new industry, and we are just now in the beginning. I will predict that in twelve or fifteen years there… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
