Word: rutan
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...Rutan woke up one morning six years ago at his desert home in Mojave, Calif., with a heat-beating idea no one had considered before: Why not build a space plane with wings that hinge up at its highest altitude, creating a feathering effect so it floats gently back to Earth like a shuttlecock in a game of badminton? Rutan quickly sketched out his idea and started showing it around...
...reception was muted. Rutan was widely respected in the experimental-plane-building industry, having designed Voyager, the first aircraft to make it around the world nonstop without refueling, which his brother Dick helped fly into the record books in 1986. But the design for SpaceShipOne inspired near universal derision. "When I first saw it, I thought he'd lost his mind," says Mike Melvill, Rutan's oldest employee, longtime friend and faithful test pilot...
...Rutan, the raised eyebrows proved he was on the right track. "If you don't have a consensus that it's nonsense," says Rutan, "you don't have a breakthrough." He showed the design to Paul Allen, the reclusive, science-fiction-loving co-founder of Microsoft. "After a few minutes with Burt," says Allen, "you realize just how innovative he is." Allen, the fifth richest guy on the planet, agreed to fund Rutan's X Prize venture...
...Rutan--who took to calling NASA "the other space agency" during the X Prize competition--firmly believes the future belongs to commercial space flight. Concerned that SpaceShipOne was destined for nothing more than the National Air and Space Museum, he and Allen enlisted another aeronautics enthusiast and billionaire, Virgin's Richard Branson. Over dinner in Mojave, they sketched out a vision of suborbital and orbital space tourism over the next 75 years. Branson was instantly won over. He ordered five larger versions of SpaceShipOne with seats for five passengers and a pilot...
...Rutan's firm, Scaled Composites, delivers on time, Virgin Galactic will be up and running in 2007. Rutan knows that to sell tickets, he must make flights "at least a hundred times" safer than space travel has been so far. After all, 18 of the 430 humans who have flown into space died there. "You can't have an airline that kills 4% of its passengers," says Rutan...