rutan

Burt Rutan designed a more modern plane, but was turned down because it was too cheap.

Folks like Lindzen, Watts, and Rutan simply haven't proven themselves to be up to the task.

He's flying a modified VariEze, one of a series of planes designed by Burt Rutan (who, among other many other things, designed SpaceShipOne).

But, there was a deeper, more fundamental problem that Rutan wasn’t even aware of, one that has bedeviled the program to this day.

By then, Rutan was gone, long since retired to a spread in Idaho.

I wonder if Burt Rutan can be subject to a product liability lawsuit for problems with a Vari-Ez et al?

This design [0] from Burt Rutan [1] is beautiful in its simplicity.

Quickie aircraft corporation - the guys who made the quickie Q2 (based on a Rutan design) were sued out of existence back in the 80's.

Following the accident, Rutan and Scaled Composites claimed ignorance.

Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites is another.

Flush with success and not knowing what he didn’t know, Rutan bet the future on a poor propulsion system that he never took the time to fully test, much less understand.

Like you mentioned about Google being more or less inevitable, I believe Burt Rutan and people like him are inevitable (in a free market) when the time is right and the technical and capital foundation is in place.

A good rule of thumb is will someone's life be jeopardized if the software fails (dialysis, automobile vehicle systems, nuclear thermal rod control, 747s, space ships (makes me wonder, actually, how "correct" Burt Rutan's X Prize spaceship software may be)).

Quoting the OP: "Remember that airplane-looking thing that Burt Rutan built, that went into space carrying some 50-year-old dude who thought he was hot shit but almost went out of control?" The pilot of SpaceShipOne was Michael Melville, he was 63 at the time, and he definitely has the Right Stuff.

Rutan may be a brilliant aviation engineer but he is not persuasive in his arguments against climate science.

Rutan steered away from liquid engines; he viewed them as being overly complicated and possessing too many failure modes.

Once engine tests began again in April 2009, engineers would discover that Rutan’s other assumption was wrong.