Burt Rutan: Building 'Tomorrowland' One Launch at a Time

Burt Rutan: Building 'Tomorrowland' One Launch at a Time

Time traveling back to when he was 12 years of age, Rutan recalls a seminal moment that triggered his yearning about space travel. In 1955, Walt Disney took television viewers into Tomorrowland – a series of Disneyland presentations that included rocket genius Wernher von Braun detailing space travel in matter-of-fact prose. Those TV shows also talked about floating in weightlessness, lunar exploration, as well as the potential for life on Mars. “It influenced my life like you wouldn’t believe,” Rutan recalled. Those television airings came before Sputnik in 1957, the selection of America’s first astronaut corps, and the flight of the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin – the first human into Earth orbit. “And we’re sitting there amazed throughout the 1960s. We were amazed because our country was going from Walt Disney and von Braun talking about it…all the way to a plan to land a man on the Moon…Wow!”

Another notable Rutan quote:

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