Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1228683
APRIL 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 65 The same thing happens with the Stratolaunch—the huge air- plane that Scaled Composites is developing. You come through a small door and look way up at the tail section. Then, turn to see a huge wing. It gives you the same feeling of, "Wow, I didn't expect it to be this big." Matties: When we look at your contributions to society, they span a lot of different areas. In the future, how do you want people to look back and remember you? Rutan: I'd like to be remembered the way I remember the huge progress in the 60s in manned space flight. I've done 392 prelim- inary designs. And 49 of them are manned airplanes that were flight- tested. It's possible that this next year, I'll be flight testing the 50 th research airplane. The volume of work is a much more impres- sive overall accomplishment than the Voyager flight. You could even argue it's a lot more impressive than SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne was easy, technically. The most difficult thing was the courage to do it. I avoided all the complexity with SpaceShi- pOne. I took the risk that we didn't need a yaw damper or autopilot. My pilots could fly it. Flight controls are basic: the stick has push- rods, and the pedals have cables, which is exactly the same flight control system you find on a Piper Cub. That's the flight control system of a manned spaceship! I found a solution to avoid a lot of heating on boost and re-entry by having a very low ballistic coefficient. That means it's more like a feather than a bullet. A feather slows down at 110,000 feet, whereas the X-15 slowed down at 60,000 feet. The difference was that I get dynamic pressure, which is a force that is seen during re-entry on your ship that's only 13% of what the X-15 saw, even though it flew two miles higher than the X-15. I figured out a way to do it simply, and I took the risk of doing it without wind tunnel test- ing. Keep in mind that the people flying it were my best friends. I want to be remembered for what I thought was unique about what I did and that I had the courage not to do wind tun- nel testing and a lot of analysis. I had devel- oped a lot of airplanes before SpaceShipOne, and I trusted my gut instead of spending hun- dreds of thousands of hours in engineering. Johnson: I'll be an airplane geek for a minute. One of the things that shows up often in your designs is the canard. You mentioned that with the early B-70s. Why was that? Rutan: I was enthralled by the Swedish Viggen. Johnson: Me too.