America was good enough to make a small compact lighter weight nuclear weapon. The Russians still had these big clunky heavy ones, so they had to build the big boosters in the arm's war, so now all of the sudden Russia could take off the shelf and put into orbit much heavier things than we could, so that's why they had the original leadership.
Burt RutanA 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.
Burt RutanNo one knows how to make going to orbit orders of magnitude safer and orders of magnitude more affordable.
Burt RutanAirplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.
Burt RutanWe didn't know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there.
Burt Rutan