Up Into the Sky In a Funny-Looking Machine

[jducoeur]

How neat. It turns out that Burt Rutan is attempting to build a spaceship. Rutan is a famous and wonderful loon, with no respect for conventional wisdom and a brilliant ability to think outside the box. He and his company have a habit of constructing utterly bizarre-looking airplanes that turn out to be far more practical than one would expect.

I'm very curious to see how this plays out. It's a remarkably tough project, but his record is quite good -- he stands a much better chance of winning the X-prize than many of the candidates I've heard about. And I'd love to see a design so fluidly artistic succeed...

Comments

[tpau]

makes me think of the white star

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Well, the mothership is called the White Knight.

The thing about Burt Rutan's remarkably efficient designs is that a lot of them are not exactly pilot-friendly. Voyager had the two pilots in a cockpit the size of a phone booth for nine days. Good thing his brother Dick is a masochistic test pilot.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

There are some really pretty pictures in this week's Aviation Week.