

Burt Rutan Is Up To Something… - bootload
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/11/burt-rutan-is-up-to-something-cool/

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frisco
One thing I've been waiting a long time for someone to announce -- and realize
I probably have a long time to keep waiting -- is a light, subsonic jet that
can do NY-SF without refueling, in about 6 hours. The current VLJ projects
(Cirrus, Honda, Diamond, etc) don't have a range that comes _close_ to that,
nor do decommissioned NASA/USAF jets (which, though they can be much cheaper
and obviously _way_ faster, _devour_ gas). Especially if you want to go
international: either you're flying essentially an arctic route and bringing
survival gear for a 3-day trip, or you're buying a $20M+ jet. A VLJ capable of
the North Atlantic tracks? Amazing.

If I ever have the resources, and Rutan is still designing aircraft, one of
the first things I'd do is see if I could commission him to design that plane.
A very long range, low-cost, 2 or 4-seater would be huge.

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joshwa
This article[1] is a very good explanation for why VLJs are un-economical and
will never have the speed, range, and efficiency of a larger jet. Written by
Austin Meyer, the developer of X-Plane, an FAA-approved flight simulator
package (and seeming inheritor of the MSFS legacy).

[1] <http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/50_avanti.html>

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frisco
I guess I don't really care if it's a jet or a turboprop. The point about the
relationship between surface area and volume and drag is a good one. It'd be
really cool if your VLJ was supersonic, in which case you win a lot for being
really small, but there are other problems there that are even more serious.

On the topic of the specific plane in the article, I've seen the Avanti and
its range still sucks wrt what I want.

Also, I wouldn't call X-Plane the _inheriter_... it's been around forever,
too!

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joshwa
More like inheritor of the MSFS developer community and userbase now that FSX
is abandonware.

Looks like you need a G-V or a Citation X. :)

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frisco
Neither the G-V nor C-X are rated for single-pilot operation... :(

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joshwa
Now there's the new G650: Mach 0.925. :) But fastest single-pilot-rated is the
Hawker 200, which does 465kt, but only 1500nm range.

(An F-15 can do 3000nm in ferry configuration... Or I wonder if you can
contract with USAF to arrange in-flight refueling over Nebraska?)

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jphackworth
I wish he was still working on spaceships. Planes already work and large
corporations dominate their development. But a breakthrough in spaceship
technology could really change all our lives.

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daimyoyo
I wish Scaled would work on a supersonic plane that could replace the Concord.
With the engineering knowledge we have today, and EC2 assembled supercomputers
to handle the computational heavy lifting a project like that would need, the
only part missing is the right company to go after it.

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cstross
Alas, development costs typically scale as the cube of the take-off weight.
Concorde was a 100-passenger SST with trans-Atlantic range at Mach 2.2 -- it
burned over 100 tonnes of fuel making the crossing and take-off weight was
comparable to a wide-body, so if you want composites as well you're talking
dev costs probably in the same range as the Boeing 787. As it is, Concorde
cost multiple billions of pounds sterling to develop in _1960s_ money. Even if
you shave an order of magnitude off the cost, you're still talking something
that Rutan could only manage if Bill Gates or Warren Buffet were to open their
wallet and bankroll him.

(Scaled Composites is no longer owned by Rutan; last I heard it was a
subsidiary of Hughes.)

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suivix
This is an article about nothing. Some guy I've never heard of it has a secret
idea. Just wonderful. There's millions of tech-savvy people with secret ideas
in various fields, and yet there is nothing reportable about it.

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bootload
_"... Some guy I've never heard of it has a secret idea ..."_

Bert Rutan is one of those Apollo inspired aero-engineers. A product of the
60's space race which inspired people to become pilots, astronauts and
engineers. You might not know of his work as a test pilot of the MD F4 [0] but
every geek & nerd knows, or should know, he is responsible for the design &
building of SpaceShipOne. [1]

Rutan is to commercial space travel what Von Braun was to Apollo.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Rutan#Life_and_career>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne>

~~~
MHBerryman
I would also throw in he gave a nice TED talk. Available at
[http://www.ted.com/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_future_of_space...](http://www.ted.com/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_future_of_space.html)

