A Secret Space Program

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hen SpaceShipOne touched down on Mojave’s Runway 30 after its third flight into space, it not only won the Ansari X Prize, but it also, in a way, completed a journey that had started on two separate paths that intertwined along the way and then finally merged together in 2004. SpaceShipOne was a small, lightweight rocketship somewhat resembling NASA’s early X-planes but with elements of Burt Rutan’s distinct flair for the unique and unconventional. Figure 1.1 shows Burt Rutan with Doug Shane, the test flight director, and the three SpaceShipOne test pilots, Pete Siebold, Brian Binnie, and Mike Melvill.

On that day test pilot Brian Binnie did more than capture the Ansari X Prize. He captured people’s imagination and reignited the space-crazy in them. Back in 1927, Charles Lindbergh, who just barely cleared telephone lines after takeoff in pursuit of the Orteig Prize, crossed the Atlantic Ocean nonstop from New York to Paris and sparked a boom in aviation like none other. These two turn­ing points forever changed the way people looked up into the sky and saw them­selves flying free as the birds or high as the stars.

Without people there would be no flying machines. It is not the mechanisms of engine, fuselage, wing, and empennage that provide transport into the air and through the clouds: it is the people whose ideas, visions, and daydreams have taken flight and soared. Without the human mind, the greatest height reached would only be as high as the highest surface that could be climbed.

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Fig. 1.1. Burt Rutan (top left), the SpaceShipOne and White Knight designer, and Doug Shane (top right), the test flight director, stand behind their test pilots, Pete Siebold, Brian Binnie, and Mike Melvill (left to right). Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC, photo­graph by Scaled Composites

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It is no coincidence that the breakthroughs in aviation have come from ingeniousness and inventiveness as early as Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of flying corkscrews and birdlike flight suits, or even earlier when the ancient Greeks pondered the air around them. As ideas like these were being conceptualized, more often than not, peers would view such thinking as folly, insanity, or even sacrilege.

Thankfully, there are a few whose hides are thicker than most, whose resilience is more enduring than most, and whose passion burns brighter than most. And more importantly, there are some whose persistence in moving forward, even if it takes stepping back­ward at times, is unwavering. It is not enough to be a great thinker. The genius lies in the execution. As inventor Thomas Edison is famous for saying, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

But these factors are no longer enough in this day and age. In centuries past, it may have been sufficient for just one person to cultivate a dream, from beginning to end, into fruition. But in today’s ever changing, ever more complicated society, often a wheel with only one cog will not provide the grip needed to take hold of an idea and spin it into something magical. It is only when the sprocket has gathered enough teeth that it can truly turn and move forward in a synchronicity of movement.

Burt Rutan

In 1965, Elbert L. “Burt” Rutan found himself in the backseat of an F-4 Phantom trying to figure out how to regain control as the fighter jet whirled around in circles in an unrecoverable flat spin. At the time, the Phantom was one of the U. S. Air Force’s frontline fighters. Under the right set of conditions, though, pilots could enter a flat spin where the only way out required the use of their ejection seats. A total of sixty-one aircraft had been lost because of this, and Rutan’s job was to determine a way to recover from this disastrous condition.

Fresh out of college, it was certainly a dream job for someone who had craved a challenge. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1943 and raised in Dinuba, California, southeast of Fresno, he had been flying model airplanes that he designed and built since he was a young boy.

“None of those things were kits,” Rutan said. “They were original designs.” He entered model-airplane competitions during high school while also learning to fly. His models took him to the nationals, and he brought home trophies.

“I was of course fascinated by space,” Rutan recalled. “I listened to the Alan Shepard flight on the radio as I was driving to my college to interview.”

Rutan attended California Polytechnic University, where he would receive his bachelor of science in aeronautical engineering. In 1964, he was one a very few students, the only one from his college, selected to attend the CalTech Space Technology Summer Institute. During this time the United States continued to lag behind the Soviet Union in the space race. Yuri Gagarin, aboard Vostok 1, had become the first man in space three years earlier, and it would be yet another five years until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would set foot on the Moon.

The U. S. space program was hungry for engineers during this electrified time. It seemed natural that someone like Rutan would have his sights set on Apollo manned Moon missions.

Rutan remembers his boyhood imagination being stirred by watching television programs where Wernher von Braun, who headed Germany’s V-2 program but was now leading NASA’s Saturn V rocket development, talked about the exploration of the Moon and Mars with Walt Disney.

“Von Braun was a big hero of mine because of the Disneyland television show in 1955,” Rutan said. “Those programs were enormously compelling to me as a twelve-year-old because we didn’t know much about Mars in ’55. I have a college astronomy textbook that I had gotten a long time ago. It was written in ’53. It is interesting to read because they are debating what kind of life is likely to be on Mars and would there be a chance that it would be intelligent life. So, imagine yourself back in a time period when you believed there was vegetation there because you saw the colors change in the telescopes.”

Rutan had a tough decision to make when it came time to leave college. Although the space program barreled forward, and opportunities
certainly waited for him, he was very skeptical about how and where he would fit in. “I felt I was so far behind on being able to come in and take a new idea and actually get it out there flying if I focused on spaceflight or manned spaceflight.”

He didn’t want to work on the space widget of the what-cha-ma-call – it subsystem. While this obscure part was indeed a piece of the puzzle that would have been necessary for launch, Rutan desired to really make a big impact and influence the big picture. Working for an airliner or fighter manufacturer didn’t interest him, for the same reason. “I’d be working on a bulkhead or a door.”

So, he turned in another direction. “I thought I could make a big dif­ference with general aviation, which I thought was archaic and frozen.” He felt that he’d have the opportunity to let his creativity fly, even if it wouldn’t be quite as high as if he worked for the U. S. space program. But Rutan’s competitiveness helped sway him in yet another direction.

“I couldn’t bring myself to go work on Cessnas while everyone I went to school with was on the way to the Moon. So, I made a compromise. I went into air force flight testing.”

This was by far the best decision Rutan could have ever made. Working as a civilian at Edwards Air Force Base in Mojave and spending six to ten months on an aircraft before moving to the next one, he learned what risks to take and what decisions to make when testing out new aircraft. This education, he felt, was critical for a designer.

“I’m out there evaluating the performance, flying qualities, safety, etc., of the top-of-the-line, brand-new military airplanes. I got to fly in them, measure data, and report on their performance.”

In the Phantom on that day in 1965 when it went into a flat spin, once Rutan and the test pilot were sure that the flat spin was unre­coverable, they deployed a special recovery parachute that forced the large fighter jet out of the spin. “I’ve done the only flat spin in an F-4 that did not have an ejection.” But the very next flight, with a different test engineer in the backseat, the spin recovery chute failed, and both the pilot and test engineer ejected to safety. Rutan still keeps in his office a piece of the F-4’s canopy from the wreckage that actually has his name on it. Eventually a procedure would be devised using the Phantom’s existing landing drag chute, which greatly reduced the rate of unrecoverable flat spins.

Rutan left the air force in 1972. He explains, “Now I could really exercise with my own responsibility, my own authority, my own decision on risk taking with nobody to answer to in developing the VariViggen, the VariEze, the Defiant, the Solitaire, and all these homebuilts. That path could never have accelerated at that rate if I had gone into the space program.”