FYI,

"Burt Rutan on Civilian Spaceflight, Breakthroughs, and Inside
SpaceShipTwo"
SPACE.com
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060811/sc_space/burtrutanonciviliansp
aceflightbreakthroughsandinsidespaceshiptwo

: At Scaled Composites--home of the privately financed and built
: SpaceShipOne that made a trio of piloted suborbital flights in
: 2004 under the rubric of Tier 1--the fabrication of a fleet of
: passenger-carrying space planes and huge carrier launch planes is
: underway. This activity is labeled Tier 1b.

: Burt Rutan, head of the firm, is chief design maestro leading a
: spaceliner workforce.

: "First of all, just because people have kind of discovered 'Oh,
: now we can have a personal commercial spaceflight industry' ...
: that doesn't mean we can just throw money at the problem and send
: people to resort hotels in orbit," Rutan told SPACE.com.

: Rutan admitted that he's frustrated but committed to building
: suborbital spaceships.

: "I'd love to be working on going to the Moon. I'm doing this
: really because I don't think I can convince a funder to go out and
: invest in an orbital system that we're not sure would work."

: In Rutan's plotting of things to come, Tier 2 is orbital.

: "My bottom line is that we have to have some kind of
: breakthroughs," Rutan explained. "What's needed is to create an
: environment to have breakthroughs ... to try things that may seem
: illogical at first."

: Looking back on SpaceShipOne, Rutan said the focus was on safety,
: on recurring cost, and asking the question: "When we're done with
: this, if it worked, could it lead right into flying the public?
: Could it be safe? I don't think that's been done to go to orbit,"
: he said.

: "I'm focusing now on going ahead and doing something that I never
: did with airplanes. That is, not just do research but go ahead and
: build something that would be certified. Produce it and sell it to
: spacelines and let them go out there and compete with each other
: to fly the public," Rutan said.

: His hunch is that by profitably flying people by the tens of
: thousands, the funding pump will be primed, and the recognition
: fostered that breakthroughs are needed for a high-risk orbital
: spaceship research program.

: "I'm getting a commercial system going for one reason: I don't
: think anybody else will," Rutan explained. "I think it's really
: important for me to build a lot of them," he added, not just a few
: for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, "but a lot of them."

: A person in SpaceShipTwo will feel just four minutes of freefall,
: so having a great big cabin is extremely important, Rutan pointed
: out, "to be able to stretch out your arms and legs and float
: around."

: To gain some think space about weightlessness, Rutan took his own
: fact-finding flight aboard the private Zero Gravity Corporation's
: aircraft.

: "The impression you get is that it's important to know why you're
: floating, so you need windows. You want to fly...you don't want to
: be strapped in. And to experience weightlessness in shirtsleeve is
: important, not being bothered with a pressure suit or tied down to
: a cable or having a helmet on," he said.

: Given SpaceShipTwo's flight path to the edge of space and back,
: the four minutes of freefall gives you what it would be like to
: live in orbit for weeks, Rutan suggested. Coming back into the
: atmosphere, he said, passengers would float gently to the craft's
: floor as it takes more than 40 seconds to reach one-gravity.

: "That's the reason we feel we'll easily be able to certify people
: floating around and getting into a seat...more of a bed to lay
: flat," Rutan said.

: Hauling a SpaceShipTwo into launch position will require use of a
: mega-mothership that's patterned after the White Knight aircraft
: utilized for the Tier 1 program.

: That giant airplane will have an identical cabin like that built
: into SpaceShipTwo. You can take up people and float them out of
: their chairs. "They can't tell they are not in the spaceship,"
: Rutan said.

: The mothership will be an aerobatic airplane, Rutan said, able to
: provide rehearsal runs that produce seconds of weightlessness for
: future suborbital space travelers, as well as offer a view of the
: dark blue sky at 50,000 feet (15 kilometers).

: "They can practice floating around, playing games, and to get into
: their positions for reentry and deceleration. We'll be able to
: give them the entire reentry g profile and I think that's
: extremely important," Rutan noted.

: Rutan said that his biggest concern was investment money "getting
: chicken" on the courage to take risk and to move forward to tackle
: issues. "I felt that Branson was making commitments so that he,
: even without me, had to finish it," he said.

: Taking a long look out to the next ten to twelve years, Rutan
: predicted that "there's going to be some very good news and some
: very bad news."

: The bad news, Rutan advised, is related to the government space
: programs. "I hate to say that, but the reason is that they are
: just structured so there will be a lot of money spent and they are
: not likely to reap the benefits that are going to help us."

: The good news, Rutan suggested as a guess, is that there will be
: breakthroughs forthcoming, stemming from what happens after the
: first generation of suborbital craft--including competitors, now
: known and unknown--take to the sky.

: "We need what amounts to natural selection to work. Nobody is
: smart enough to know ahead of time whether something is the right
: answer. You've got to field the good ones and bad ones for the
: good ones to float to the top," Rutan said.

Mark Reiff