Think Big

You gotta hand it to Burt Rutan, the genius creator of SpaceShipOne, which recently became the first privately-built spacecraft and won the Ansari X-Prize. He makes coloring outside the lines a daily routine. While flush with success, he's only picking up his pace. His next stop: an orbital space vehicle.

In a very interesting article on msnbc.com, Rutan is already thinking of what will be:

“I predict in five or six years, the average kid is no longer just hoping and dreaming that he’ll go to space. He knows he will. He’ll at least take one of these suborbital flights that are flying every other day or every day here at Mojave.”

While initially expensive, flights into space will drop in price over time.

“I predict that within 10 years from now, maybe 12 years, kids will know that they will go to orbit in their lifetime. They will know they will … not just dream and hope.”

Turning his attention to the larger aerospace firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin that offer pricey lines of boosters, Rutan offers free advice.

“They are thinking SpaceShipOne is a toy. That assumption is akin to the mentality of IBM in 1975. At that time, they believed people weren’t going to have cheap computers. Computers were mainframes, and they had to be complex and very specialized."

That was the view of IBM, he pointed out.

“IBM didn’t know in 1975 that they were going to build $700 computers for people and that they were going to build them by the tens of thousands. But then came Apple,and they had to.”

That being the case, Rutan made another prediction:

“Lockheed and Boeing will be making very low-cost access to space hardware within 20 years. They just don’t know it yet…because they’re going to have to.”

That's thinking big. It's why Burt Rutan is so essential: he sees what the rest of us cannot or don't dare to. Reach for the stars, Burt. Reach for the stars.