NASA is doing nothing but development. They're not doing research in manned spaceflight at all and I see no reason for them to do that because we already know that it will work and we already know exactly how it will work.
Burt RutanThere was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots.
Burt RutanThere will be a new industry, and we are just now in the beginning. I will predict that in twelve or fifteen years there will be tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, that fly and see that black sky.
Burt RutanThere is a rampant tendency in any industry where someone is trying to sell something with a bunch of data, where they cherry pick a little bit... bias a little bit. This becomes quite easy when there is an enormous amount of data to cherry pick from.
Burt RutanThe next 15 years will see thousands of people leave the atmosphere on suborbital flights. My company's SS2 system might fly 100,000 people by 2024. If it is shown to be highly profitable, perhaps we will see 20,000 people traveling to orbit by 2035, and then thousands to the moon by 2050. If we make a courageous decision, like the program we kicked off for Apollo, we will see our grandchildren in outposts on other planets.
Burt Rutan