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84 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2020 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE research aircraft. And there had been two sig- nificant milestones: in 1986, the Voyager flight around the world without stopping or refu- elling, and in 2004, the suborbital flight of SpaceShipOne. The Rutan Model 76 Voyager was designed in 1981 by a team led by Burt Rutan at the Rutan Aircraft Company and built largely by volunteers over the following five years, using space-age materials, without government sup- port and with minimal corporate sponsorship. For its round-the-world flight, it was piloted by Burt's brother Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager. SpaceShipOne was financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built at Scaled Compos- ites, and won the $10 million Ansari-X prize for being the first privately-developed space- craft to carry a pilot into suborbital space. Rutan made it clear that SpaceShipOne was a personal goal rather than a customer request. Rutan reviewed the irregular progression of manned space launch systems from 1960 to the present day. During the 1960s, there had been nine in eight years, but from 1970 to 2020, only three new manned launch systems had flown, of which the Shuttle was one and SpaceShi- pOne was another. Rutan had little respect for NASA, which he considered risk-averse, and in 50 years, had never had a consistent goal. He saw it as a failure. "Small teams can accomplish big goals," was a Rutan maxim. One of his photographs showed the entire project team that had worked on SpaceShipOne, standing in front of their creation at the presentation of the $10-million Ansari X-Prize. I counted 26 people! "An engineer in a normal company structure gets to work on two or three airplanes in their whole career. We have done 23 airplanes in 20 years." His Scaled Composites engineering team had already designed and was starting to build two new craft: an enlarged version of SpaceShipOne, together with a new mother ship for launching it. What good was a private suborbital space industry? Was it just for fun? Rutan drew a parallel with the home computer— which, in his view, was "just for fun" before the internet. In 2004, he had predicted that commercial suborbital space flight would be big business, a successful flight would dem- onstrate the capability and attract investment, and even small companies like his could send people into space. But he had now changed his mind because he believed that it might never be profitable and would need some break- throughs for affordability and safety. "Entrepreneurs are the future of space flight," said Rutan. He also remarked that four billion- aires were leading the space race of the moment: Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Paul Allen. All four were of an age that they could have taken their original inspiration from the Apollo programme as impressionable kids. He considered that the approaches taken by Musk and Bezos to employ reusable rather than expendable rocket boosters would make orbital flight more cost-effective, and that ongo- ing development would increase safety. A little closer to the ground, Rutan debated the practicalities of urban air transport, using New York City as his example. Could 2000 eVTOL aircraft replace 4500 taxicabs? Transit time wasn't the issue; it was access to realistic pick-up and drop-off points. In his estimation, there were 400,000 curbsides available on the street compared with 1,000 ports on the tops of buildings. Whereas passengers could board or leave a taxi in about 15 seconds, it could take five minutes to reach the top of a building to similarly board or leave an eVTOL aircraft. Rutan calculated that the total throughput