Burt Rutan People Quotations

Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The smart people dont.

For the industry we're starting now, for suborbital flight, there is no destination, so the spacecraft you go up in has to be large and spacious. That's why SpaceShipTwo is much bigger than SpaceShipOne: It needs to be because you want those six people to be floating around and enjoying themselves.

By 1973, we had a space station, the Skylab, and we had multiple probes going up to planets. So, all this wonderful stuff happened in 10 to 15 years. About that time, there should have been enormous initiatives to make it affordable for people to fly in space, not just a handful of trained NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts.

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 a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.

Our hope is that this will be a benchmark ... for a lot more people to not only have fun but to reap the benefits that we believe might be there,

We have a lot of openings for people...not just engineers, but people that can help us build research spaceships and production spaceships.

We are looking for people that like to build things with their hands and are good craftsman. We need those that give 100-percent each day and enjoy a fast-paced research and development environment.

As opposed to the first 44 years of manned spaceflight, ... the difference is people are going to know that it is for them.

There will be a new industry. And we are just now in a beginning. I will predict that in 12 or 15 years, there will be tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people that fly, and see that black sky.

At first, it will be real rich people, hundreds of them flying into suborbital space, ... But what will happen is you'll run out of real rich people real quickly.

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 a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.