Latest Burt Rutan Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Look at the aerospace industry as it was just after the Kennedy talk. We were hiring like crazy. We were trying to get people graduated from college. Hey, you got to go to the program. We need you.

  Burt Rutan

  Crazy, College, Aerospace

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Research And Development, Two, Differences

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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.

  Burt Rutan

  Believe, Talking, People

  Source: bigthink.com

• America was good enough to make a small compact lighter weight nuclear weapon. The Russians still had these big clunky heavy ones, so they had to build the big boosters in the arm's war, so now all of the sudden Russia could take off the shelf and put into orbit much heavier things than we could, so that's why they had the original leadership.

  Burt Rutan

  War, Russia, America

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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.

  Burt Rutan

  Research, Development, Doing Nothing

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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.

  Burt Rutan

  Men, America, Space

  Source: bigthink.com

• Achieving something that has never existed in manned spaceflight and that is high volume and public access.

  Burt Rutan

  Achieve, Volume, Spaceflight

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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.

  Burt Rutan

  Moon, Dollars, Use

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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.

  Burt Rutan

  Names, Oil, Car

  Source: bigthink.com

• No one knows how to make going to orbit orders of magnitude safer and orders of magnitude more affordable.

  Burt Rutan

  Order, Orbit, Magnitude

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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.

  Burt Rutan

  Creative, Littles, Astronaut

  Source: bigthink.com