Tony Rusi wrote:
This article raised interesting questions. Why didn't Burt do a
spaceship like this 30 years ago? The only technology that wasn't
there for sure then was the mini-electronics for a super lightweight
guidance control and communication system.

The problem is mindset and worldview. In the mid 1970s space was
considered a job for governments and megacorporations. People only started
taking the idea of small independent groups building manned spacecraft as
a serious possibility in the 1990s or thereabouts (though there were
people even in the 1970s who were thinking about this, and even trying to
build hardware, IIRC). Once a few people started doing the math and
talking it up a critical mass began to form, leading directly to Rutan's
current effort. The whole point of the X-Prize is not to get somebody to
do a one-off: it's to change thinking. It there had been an X-Prize in
1975 it probably would have been won by 1985, possibly by Rutan himself.

Can anyone else list some technology or other barriers that made
private sub-orbital flight in the mid seventies impossible or highly
improbable?

Considering that by the mid seventies the basic technology for suborbital
flight was 30 years old, no. A V-2 knockoff was no more impossible then
than now, and fundraising might even have been slightly easier without the
additional 30 years of "space is hard" propaganda from NASA.

As always, IMO,
.....Andrew
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Andrew Case |
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