A growth update

In our book, one of the No Box growth leaders we featured was Burt Rutan, whose company Scaled Composites designed and created SpaceShipOne, which won the $10 million Ansari X prize. We also introduced Burt’s vision of creating a space tourism industry. That’s right, Burt and others are dreaming about flights into space for the average person. Can you imagine the thousands of reasons why this “can never be done?”

From time to time, we will provide updates about the people and examples from the book and here is one of them about Burt’s endeavor. This is from an interview with Richard Branson, a No Box kind of guy himself, who heads the Virgin Group, which includes the company Virgin Galactic. His comments come from the October 2007 issue of The Atlantic. Enjoy.

I then set off around the world to meet every zany, mad scientist I could find who was interested in rockets and space technology … and then finally came across Burt Rutan, who’s a genius … so we agreed to sponsor SaceShipOne with him, and we watched the three magnificent flights in SpaceShipOne, and then – using that technology – we’re now building SpaceShipTwo, which is twice as big as SpaceShipOne. A year from know it will go on its first test flight, and 18 months from now, you know, myself, my children and my parents … God willing … will go up.

The initial flights will go up about 70 miles into space, so basically you’ll take off, you’ll go up to 60,000 feet, you’ll be attached under the mother ship, you’ll then drop away, you’ll then have the biggest rush of your life … from naught to 3,500 miles an hour in 10 seconds. And then in space you’ll unbuckle, and we’ve got these enormous big windows you’ll be able to float around looking back at the Earth. And Burt has come up with this really unique device, which is basically what he calls his “feathering mechanism.” It comes back into the Earth’s atmosphere like a shuttlecock, which slows it up, so you don’t have the problems that NASA has with its reentry system.

Couple of fascinating items we hope you will take from this story. First, Burt has been at it again in figuring out novel answers to tough problems. Our guess is his shuttlecock technology will work. Second, we love the name of Branson’s business that is devoted to space tourism - Virgin Galactic! Sounds like they are really serious about this.

Rest assured, they will hit more than a reasonable number of insurmountable barriers over the next couple years, but it will be really exciting to see how far they are able to take their dream. And how knows, one day in the not too distant future, maybe you will have the opportunity to join them on a voyage into space!