Burt Rutan Quotes

For Virgin Galactic's customers, it is transportation to the most amazing experience of their lives. I very much look forward to sending some Scots into space.

I've been lucky enough to have flown some very interesting aircraft in the past, but SpaceShipTwo is far and away the most exciting of them all.

I have watched SS2 evolve over the years into an incredible vehicle that is going to open up space to more people than ever before.

I want people to go into space, to orbit around the world a few times, even to stay there for 24 hours and then come back to where they took off. And I also want people with a low income to be able to do that, not only rich people.

Virgin Galactic, which will be operating SpaceShipTwo, will be only one of several spacelines. The competitors for Virgin include the Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, and possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And likely a couple of others who are smart enough not to tell people what they are doing!

With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.

If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

The fact that the Virgin logo was on the side of SpaceShipOne on October 4th, 2004 was fantastic.

When you're on a Soyuz flight, you know that when you go to Russia, you're going to do X, Y, and Z. You have that plan already laid out.

On the first flight test of any spacecraft, you're going to find surprises.

In addition to the vehicles currently known, the holy grail of commercial spaceflight remains a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) reusable spaceplane.

I believe you'll see a low Earth orbit space travel business begin.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

I had started Zero-G specifically to broaden the public for access to weightlessness.

Look how far the human race has come in terms of air and space travel in the last hundred years. So in the next couple of thousand years, you've got to believe that we're going to be able to do all kinds of amazing things.

It seems that 'rocket scientist' is a job category that's here for the long haul, like 'mortician.' But all this activity masks an important point: rockets are not a terribly efficient way to lift things into space.

In 12 or 15 years, there will be routine, affordable space tourism not just in the U.S. but in a lot of countries.

I think eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help.

If I got the option of going into outer space and hanging out there for a day and then coming back home and dying the next day, or just waiting around to see if there's any opportunity for the technology to develop so that I might experience outer space sometime in the future, I would probably take the ride today and die tomorrow.

I don't classify myself as the first space tourist because I wasn't as though I paid and had a holiday out of it - although I had a fab time.

Putting seven people in orbit should not cost more than flying a commercial jet around Earth.

We must become a space-faring nation.

Not only shall we be able to cruise in space, …

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it's cool.