Burt Rutan is one of the US’s leading aeronautical engineers, noted for his innovative designs and light, energy-efficient air and spacecraft, including Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. In a rare interview, he talks to David Cohen about his work, conspiracy theories and the explosion that claimed the lives of three engineers
“We call it Mojavewood – have you seen the movie?” asks Burt Rutan sardonically as we drive away from a glitzy ceremony and towards the legendary aircraft designer’s office, tucked away in a hangar at Mojave airport, California. Suddenly he bursts into song “Oh Mojaaavewood, tada tada tada Mojaaaveewooood…”
We’ve just escaped a throng of several hundred journalists and VIPs, including the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Richard Branson, his children and their high-society friends. They were gathered on a runway under two makeshift tents for the unveiling of the not-quite-finished spacecraft that Rutan is building for Branson. When completed, SpaceShipTwo (SS2), this evening rechristened Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise, will carry six passengers and two crew to an altitude of over 100 kilometres to experience 5 minutes of weightlessness and a view of Earth only a handful of people have seen with their own eyes.
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Despite being a bit of a media recluse – had he got his way, today’s event wouldn’t have happened at all – Rutan is a megastar in aerospace circles. Over the last 40 years he has overseen the design and construction of more than 40 novel aircraft, including the record-breaking and ultra-efficient Voyager, which in 1986 flew non-stop around the world on a single tank of fuel.
In October 2004, financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, he secured a place in the history books when one of his aircraft, the waif-like White Knight, carried another of his designs, a rocket plane called SpaceShipOne (SS1), up to 50,000 feet. From there, SS1 was launched to the edge of space, winning Rutan the X Prize, an international contest to build the first privately funded crewed spacecraft to fly to an altitude of at least 100 kilometres and return safely to Earth twice within two weeks.
Rutan is so focused on his work that perhaps it’s no surprise he doesn’t have much time for the Branson glitz, complete with an ice sculpture of an astronaut. “These folk come, they party and tomorrow they’ll all be gone, and then we can go back to work.” He reflects for a minute, then adds with a hint of bemusement, “Roll-outs are different with every customer, but I don’t think we’ve ever had one with an ice carving from Iceland.”
Born Elbert L. Rutan in 1943 and raised in Dinuba, California, he began building model aircraft as a child. He graduated from California Polytechnic State University with a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1965 and landed a job as a flight test engineer at the US military’s Edwards Air Force Base, not far from Mojave. “It was unbelievable training for a youngster,” he says. Rutan later set up an aircraft design company and in 1982 went on to found Scaled Composites to enable him to realise his own creations, including SS2.
Now, at 66, Rutan still looks in good shape, with his trademark sideburns like tiny folded wings. He has no plans to retire, although these days he’s taking it a bit easy after a rare heart condition took him out of action for a while a couple of years ago. It also ended his flying days – Rutan has notched up 4000 hours. “To my surprise, I don’t miss flying. I had this warm feeling. I thought, ‘I’m not going to die in a general aviation incident’,” he says.
I whip out my list of questions, but before I get to the first, Rutan blindsides me. “Which magazine are you from again?” I tell him. “OK, well, I won’t talk to Scientific American,” he says, “They improperly covered man-made global warming. They drink Kool-Aid instead of doing research. They parrot stuff from the IPCC and Al Gore.” I’m taken aback but curiosity gets the better of me so I ask him what he means. For the next 30 minutes he launches into an impassioned diatribe. He believes claims of catastrophic global warming are nothing but scare-mongering and are a product of “the greatest scientific fraud ever”. At first I think this is some sort of joke but he’s totally serious and at times gets quite angry.
And yet, if you didn’t know his views, you’d think Rutan was an arch environmentalist. In 1989 his house featured in Popular Science magazine, billed as the ultimate energy-efficient dwelling, and for years he drove an electric car. “People thought I was a liberal and a tree-hugger, but I’m not. It’s not because I have any concern about saving the planet, or peak oil. It’s about neat technology.”
Rutan has a penchant for swimming against the tide. Every few years he gets hooked by some sort of mystery and pretty quickly it completely absorbs his spare time. First it was how the pyramids were built, then there was the assassination of JFK. Hunting for the “real” motive for the murder took Rutan to a “darkened library” in Washington DC where, just like in a scene from a John Grisham novel, documents he looked up one day mysteriously went missing the next.
His appetite for mystery and controversy has served him well in his aerospace work. His approach to research sums up his attitude: take an idea and tell it to a bunch of experts in the field. “If half of them believe it’s impossible, and half think it’s really hard but worth doing, then it’s a research project.”
“If half the engineers think it’s impossible and half think it’s hard, it’s worth doing”
That’s how the feathering mechanism that softens the re-entry of SS1 and SS2 came about. “I had a lot of critics, very experienced aerodynamicists, telling me this thing will spin like a top and you won’t be able to recover it. It’s a crazy idea. But I knew that it would work.” Rutan hinged the wings of the craft so that for the first part of the journey back through Earth’s atmosphere they fold by almost 90 degrees and the craft falls like a shuttlecock, with minimum acceleration. Only once it is deep in the atmosphere do the wings straighten out again, allowing a glided landing, rather than a parachute splashdown like the Apollo capsules.
Rutan’s career has not all been plain sailing, though. In July 2007 came a terrible reminder that building rockets can be a deadly business. An explosion during a test to examine the flow of nitrous oxide in a rocket motor killed three workers. An independent investigation did not determine a cause but it was likely caused by the nitrous oxide somehow escaping the system. “We have several hypotheses and we redesigned the rocket motor to make sure none of those possibilities could happen again. I can’t say any more about it,” Rutan says.
I ask him if the accident changed his mind about the programme. “Well we lost a lot of sleep at night because of it.” If there had been a risk he couldn’t ameliorate, Rutan says, then he would have considered stopping development, but that was not the case. “I think there’s considerably less risk on the rocket motor system now. We were taking a big risk on SS1 but we didn’t know it. It could have happened then. The safety elements on the rocket motor of SS2 are now much more significant than they were on SS1, partially because of the accident.”
We’re abruptly interrupted by a phone call. Gale-force winds have blown Branson’s tents into the desert and all the guests have been evacuated to a nearby hotel. When we join them, Rutan holds forth at Branson for a few minutes over the wisdom of letting the party go ahead in such bad weather. For a large part of the next hour we return to his views on global warming until it’s time for me to head back to my hotel.
Over the next few days Rutan sends me numerous emails supporting his argument about a climate change conspiracy. I am far from convinced, but find myself thinking there’s something beguiling about such passionate persistence – perhaps this is exactly what makes him such a maverick genius.
Profile
Burt Rutan is an aeronautical engineer and the founder of leading aircraft design firm Scaled Composites, based in Mojave, California. He won the Ansari X Prize, designed Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft and his Voyager plane was the first to fly around the world non-stop without refuelling
