Burt Rutan Before SpaceShipOne
Early on I realized I needed to talk to Burt Rutan, the greatest aircraft designer alive; we needed to talk about FAA regulations and how they stifle innovation. The greatest concern I had on an ongoing basis was that the regulatory program for commercial space transportation would turn into the very thing that would hold back the fledgling industry. So many other industries had been hampered by government bureaucrats who perceived their missions as “controlling” and “managing” their designated industries without thought to the negative second order consequences for both the industry and the public. The day I met Burt Rutan, he hadn’t even thought about space, much less SpaceShipOne.
The industry needed an environment where it could experience failures in the same way that the early aviation industry had. Without unfettered experimentation, space travel would not experience the rapid development and evolution we witnessed in manned air flight. For example, many people had tried and failed to cross the Atlantic Ocean before Charles Lindbergh succeeded in an effort to win the Ortieg Prize.
We went to great lengths to avoid the mistakes other agencies had made. We commissioned studies of various major regulatory systems—marine, nuclear, aviation, etc—that had had negative impacts on their respective industries in some form or another, We tried to pinpoint the fundamental pitfalls to avoid. We even assembled experts from various regulated industries for a week-long session to discuss the regulation of commercial space passenger flight in an era with a risk-averse public.
Another way to get an insight into how regulation might affect innovation was to invite one of the pre-eminent aircraft innovators in the world to DC and invite his opinion on the aspects of aviation regulation that were particularly onerous, innovation-inhibiting, and for which there were simpler, more effective solutions to achieving aircraft safety.
Burt Rutan is a legendary American aircraft designer who consistently defies convention and creates new designs that change aircraft standards. He has five aircraft on display in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.: SpaceShipOne, the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, Voyager, Quickie, and the VariEze.
I invited Burt Rutan to meet with us in DC at our expense. (I don’t recall the year, but it must have been shortly after President Clinton was elected because I believe that Stephanie Lee Meyers was already in a lame duck status which would make it late 1992 or early 1993.) Stephanie Meyers, Don Trilling and I met with Mr. Rutan. We spent several hours getting his views on the effects of FAA’s regulatory system on aircraft safety and aviation. Primarily, I was trying to uncover his perception of the mistakes we could make that would hurt this new industry.
He was having difficulty identifying specific things that we might do that could hurt the industry. Finally, he explained why. Burt Rutan said something like, “Norman, I am very flattered you brought me here to talk about how regulations could hurt space transportation, but I don’t know anything about space. I have not even thought about it.” When he said that, I asked him why his company, Graphite Composites, was working on the COMET reentry vehicle. His answer was that they were simply a contractor building to specs.
The irony of this comment was that in 2004 (only 9 years after I left the Office of Commercial Space Transportation), Burt Rutan won the $10M Ansari X Prize for the first private manned space vehicle flown by a non-government pilot. SpaceShipOne, which Burt Rutan designed and built with his company, Scaled Composites, successfully completed the first manned private space flight. (We had achieved the equivalent of talking to the Wright brothers before they had ever thought about flying.)