Riff Raff in Space
by Raymond M. Coulombe

All hail Burt Rutan! Rutan is the guy who had this crazy idea that he could build a plane that could travel nonstop around the world on a single tank of fuel. He built it. It worked. Now good old Burt wants to go to space. Good for Burt. Better for the rest of us. I have no doubt he'll succeed.

The cool thing about Burt Rutan is that he builds stuff. It's one thing to generate great plans on a computer, but this guy does more. He actually makes stuff that works. His SpaceShipOne exists. It's already built. Flight testing has begun.

It's a clever system. Picture a launch plane (The White Night) with a smaller craft (SpaceShipOne) nestled beneath it. The White Night goes up to 50,000 feet or so. Once the proper altitude has been achieved, SpaceShipOne's rocket fires up and cuts loose, screaming upward at Mach 3.5. Fast enough to blow your hat off, no doubt about it. This happy little rocket tops out at 62.5 miles. To reenter its wings kick up, creating drag, bringing the whole thing down like a shuttlecock.

This spaceship looks as sleek as anything in Science Fiction. It's that way we want a spaceship to look. It looks like something NASA would build if the bean counters and management called in sick, the engineers got into the fuel grade ethanol, and their teenage drag racing sons helped build it. They could have built it, but would have spent 10 billion to do so.

Burt built it as a side project of his small company. He built it cheap, fast too. Burt's the king of the aerospace junkyard wars. The White Knight's engines are the cheapest salvaged jet engines he could find. The shuttlecock design allows for easier, slower reentries. Currently, there isn't even a special navigation computer, as Burt thinks it won't need one. No specially designed, individual ceramic tiles for this baby. The heat shield is made from a material that's troweled on. The plane and the rocket both have similar cockpits and instruments to facilitate training. Cheap. Cheap. Cheap.

The current plan is to do a launch every week for five months. Isn't that the sort of turn around time we hoped we were getting with NASA's shuttle? Sure, the shuttle is much bigger, can fly higher, and is more capable all around, but when's the last time we had a successful launch? The way things are going, SpaceShipOne might be in space before NASA's shuttle returns. It is big enough and strong enough for the potentially lucrative micro satellite launch business. It would make a great thrill ride. I'd go. Heck, I'd go first, if they'd ask me.

Rutan isn't even interested in developing the business. He's leaving that for other people. He'll be onto his next big thing before you know it. The point is, he's proving what can be done. Once someone does it cheap and fast, others are sure to follow. A lot of people are thinking outside the box right now. Other companies and individuals are making their own push into space. There's money to be made there, so it will happen.

Unless of course, the big space faring nations find a way to keep the independents down. I've had my suspicions. NASA killed some promising launch systems -at least one of them cheap and reusable. I've heard nasty rumors that certain people in high places want to keep space expensive and exclusive. They want to keep the Riff Raff out. Maybe the rich and powerful are afraid we'll put up trailer parks on the moon?

Screw ‘em! Thanks to people like Burt Rutan, the great unwashed have a shot at space. Red Necks. Slackers. Drunks. Bums. Hippies. Rastas. The whole great variety of humanity, not just the "top gun" types, will have a shot at a new life. Maybe the same sort of people who build motorcycles in their garage will build space craft from plans downloaded from the Internet. OK, maybe that's not Burt Rutan's intent, but there is no telling where cheap and easy launch vehicles will take us. Can't wait to see what will happen next.

Thanks, Burt, for keeping the dream alive.

Direct link to the web site: http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/

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