Following up on a childhood dream, and something I made an earlier post on, I went to a lecture by Burt Rutan on the Stanford campus, sponsored by the Aero/Astro Department. Burt spoke to an auditorium in San Jose last night, but this was an opportunity to see him in a more intimate setting with about 50 other people.
The talk was decidedly more technical than I had heard before, and it was satisfying to see him speak to an audience without fear that he would have to explain every other term. I had assumed that the questions would also be highly technical, but aside from the question I asked before the lecture about the design considerations in overcoming the high dihedral effect his team experienced in their first private sub-orbital vehicle, SpaceShipOne, the question and answer period took a political u-turn. In hindsight, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised: Most of the people in the room are at various stages of completing an advanced degree in Aero/Astro, and it is assumed that most of them will be applying to, if not working for NASA or one of the top tier aerospace companies. Burt is one of those institutions' most outspoken critics.
Other than in journalists' accounts of his attitude toward NASA and pork-barrel aerospace contracts, I had never heard someone so angry with the state of space exploration today. And for the first time I was able to empathize with his feelings. He related a short anecdote about growing up in the heyday of space exploration. Watching as Gagarin to Armstrong blazed an unbelievably fast trail of exploration and progress. Orbital flight? 3 years. Moon mission? 8 years. Space station? 4 years. The most moving part of his delivery was when he said, "And I was so lucky to be young at the time. Young enough that by the time I was grown, I would be going to Mars, and the outer planets, and back." But it all stopped, NASA asked congress to spend a huge amount of money to build a vehicle (the shuttle) that would cut the cost of routine payload lifting to 10% of what it was before. By the time it took its first flight, the costs were over 10 times what they had been with earlier disposable vehicles. By the time Burt came of age, and realized his dreams weren't going to happen, he felt cheated.
He has channeled those feelings into a very effective and well crafted critique of the way experimental aviation and aerospace is done today. A critique that is hard to ignore given the award-winning and commercial success of the 36 aircraft (and one spacecraft) he has built "his way". On the future of manned spaceflight, Burt's hopes rest squarely in the private sector.