Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than… — Burt Rutan Copy Share Image
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… — 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
