Ron,

No one's sneering at brilliant aerospace Columbus types like you guys
Ron. But the era of expensive government-only exploration is over.
Burt Rutan is Mayflower. He's trying to get the rest of us slobs over
to the New World for a new life. What Burt *has* always sneered at is
the lack of follow through by the government so that all this
fantastic technology will trickle down to the common man. The common
man is what Burt has always been about. And this always seems to lead
to hard feelings by people who are entrenched in doing things the same
expensive government slow-turtle way all the time that invariable
always leads to the ignorant masses clamoring for cancellation of all
those expensive unnecessary space missions to places we have already
been.

Burt Rutan is, if you like, our de facto Robin Hood of Aviation and
now, Space. Most of us have dreamed all our lives of the emergence
of a "Dutch East India" type company that would greatly supplant the
government's stranglehold of the high seas (or rather in this case:
the high altitudes.) I just didn't think I would be lucky enough to
see it in my lifetime.

The famed Dutch East India Company didn't invent the lateen sail or
the sternpost rudder either, but their improvement of those basic
concepts lead to the greatest commercial conquest the world had ever
seen of the known globe. Burt does the same thing with publicly
available NASA data, e.g. winglet on the vari ezie, lifting body data
on Space Ship One.

Enjoyed your post very much Ron, glad to see you aren't using Acme's
disappearing/reappearing ink anymore, aye "Dr a.a.com."

pacplyer



Ron Wanttaja wrote in message . ..
On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:06:23 -0400, Matt Whiting
wrote:


No, I didn't miss it and I doubt the others did either. The comparison
was time delta of the first GOVERNMENT sponsored flight of a spacecraft
to the first private one. If the same timescale was applied to
conventional airplanes, you would be comparing the first GOVERNMENT
sponsored flight of a conventional airplane to the first private one.
Backing 40 years off of 1943 yields 1903, which is NOT when the first
GOVERNMENT sponsored airplane flew successfully, so the comparison is
completely invalid.

The purpose of the comparison was merely to illustrate the time spans
involved, not to try to contrast the difference between government vs.
private efforts. A less controversial comparison would have been along the
lines of "...it was as if no else other than the Wright brothers had been
technically capable of building an airplane until 1943."

Rutan's achievement is tremendous, but let's not forget, he's standing on
the shoulders of giants. SpaceShipOne's success is due to Rutan's
brilliant combining of today's cutting-edge technology. He probably has
more computing power on his desktop than NASA had in 1960. There wasn't
any wind-tunnel testing done on SpaceShipOne; it was all done on a
computer.

Yet, barely ten years ago, the first flight of an improved launch vehicle
failed because the aerodynamic models used weren't accurate enough. That
company trusted the computer model and didn't do any wind tunnel testing.
The launch vehicle and satellite end up in the drink. Oops.

Burt Rutan was fully aware of this instance...after all, his company built
part of that rocket's structure (which was in *no* way involved in the
failure). Yet, in ten short years, modeling capabilities have improved to
the point where he felt confident in risking a manned flight on
computational data only.

Rutan did one heck of a job, but some folks in this newsgroup have used it
as an excuse to sneer at the people who developed some of the technologies
that made it possible. If suborbital space flight was so doggone easy, the
first private space launch would have been four years after the X-15, not
forty.

Ron Wanttaja