Burt Rutan does several presentations and classes at Oshkosh every year. I went to his talk in the EAA Museum today on "Designs for Success".

Burt Rutan discusses "Designs for Success" in front of many of his aircraft designs at Oshkosh 2006.

Rutan believes that humans exist, instead of Neanderthals, because we explored. Because humans explored environments that were unfamiliar, and perhaps more difficult to live in, we didn't get trapped by the ice ages that wiped out other hominids. Humans exist because we took risks. If we don't explore space, and learn to live in it full time, our fate is to be trapped on earth and eventually suffer it's fate.

Rutan vividly remembers seeing Werner von Braun on a Disney TV show about "Tomorrow" when he was a kid in 1955. Von Braun had the audacity back before we had even orbited a satellite to show the concepts and techniques we could use to travel to Mars. In an obvious dig at NASA's Apollo Part Deux, he says that whatever we're doing now, we should be going forward, not backward.

Space flight in orbit must be enormously less expensive in order for regular people to afford it, it must be far safer, and he has no idea how to do that. He's hoping that his work will advance the science so that someone else can answer those questions.

In the first days of commercial air travel a person boarding an airliner had a 1 in 6,000 chance of dying on that flight. Within 3 years, using the same equipment, but with 3 years experience of what to do and not do, that rate was 1 in 33,000. That's the kind of safety we need for regular people in sub-orbital space, and he is convinced that he can do that. The current safety record in space is about a 1 in 70 chance of dying.

Rutan claims that the most dangerous time to use rocket engines is at sea level, in an atmosphere filled with oxygen, where anything that leaks is a hazard. For that reason alone, safe space travel must use rockets only in the far upper atmosphere, where any leaks will disperse, and cannot cause fire. He says that when our children fly in space, it will be from an air launch.

Rutan was working at Edwards Air Force Base when the only fatality took place in the X-15 program. The issue was an instrumentation failure, which caused the X-15 to be outside a very narrow angle-of-attack range that was safe for re-entry without going out of control. The shuttle has the same narrow AOA safety range. That was the impetus for the "care free" reentry system he developed for SS1. With the shuttle cock method, the vehicle can re-enter at any attitude, yet stabilize itself correctly, and slow down at a much higher altitude than the X-15.

Space Ship 1 re-entered the atmosphere at Mach 3, but its speed at "Max Q" was only 145 knots indicated, and occurred at 105 thousand feet. By contrast, the X-15 Max Q was around 600 knots IAS, and occurred at 65 thousand feet with much hotter temps. The heat protection on SS1 is not for re-entry, but for accelerating upwards under power.

Rutan claims that Return On Investment for spacecraft development takes half the time than it does for a General Aviation aircraft. There are "three or four" companies that will be buying Rutan manufactured Space Ship 2's. He is "in a hurry" now, working harder and faster than at any time in his life, while his company is growing and hiring people.

He compared the efforts today in space to the computer industry. We had personal computers for decades before "Al Gore invented the internet" and we discovered what they are best used for. He believes spacecraft will undergo the same development path, where it must be used by many thousands of people before one person has the bright idea that will make its use commonplace.

People who operate NASA spacecraft today are trained to only "use a checklist". Houston trains people to ignore their creativity. They must only do what's accepted, lest they not be allowed in space at all. That process destroys the opportunity to come up with the application that will open space travel for everyone.

Asked whether his "care free" re-entry will be used on orbital spacecraft, he reverted to Greenspan speak. He claimed that because of business ventures and ongoing projects, he can't talk about that kind of thing. He pointed out that he never shows his airplanes until they've flown. But from the tone, it sounds like he is now working on orbital re-entry systems, and some variation on his safety oriented shuttle cock aerodynamics will be used.

Rutan's dream is to fly around the moon in a big elliptical orbit. He says that it would take very little more money to make such a flight after achieving earth orbit. Moon landing is much harder though, mainly because of the moon launch costs. The lack of atmosphere on the moon allows you to do things you can't do on earth. He wants to buzz the mountains of the moon at 8000 mph ... and 3 feet altitude.

Burt Rutan and his trademark sideburns.

Posted 10:54PM OSH local by Dennis Collins - Oshkosh Day 2