EAA reserved its largest pavilion, and every seat was filled, with more crowding in around the edges, when Burt Rutan, Sir Richard Branson, and Will Whitehorn arrived at AirVenture on Tuesday afternoon — and the crowd rose to a thundering, standing ovation to welcome the virtual rock stars of the experimental world. Rutan has been coming to Oshkosh every year since 1971, he said, missing only last year due to health issues, and he looked fit and tan and delighted to be back in front of his favorite audience. Whitehorn, CEO of Virgin Galactic, showed a brief video of the unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo at Mojave on Monday (click here to see that event via AVweb video), and after a few brief remarks the forum was turned over to questions from the audience. Rutan said he expects that within his lifetime, tourists will not only be routinely flying into space, they will also be visiting orbiting resort hotels and taking a loop around the moon. Whitehorn said that he plans to fly space trips from many venues besides the New Mexico spaceport now under construction, and he hopes that the first place they will launch from will be Oshkosh — and Rutan added that he hopes to sell $5 raffle tickets to fill those six seats.
Whitehorn emphasized the practical uses of the technology that is being developed, and said he envisions a future when suborbital trajectories will be used for point-to-point travel — for example, hopping from Sydney to Oshkosh in three hours or less. Rutan also made his usual pitch inviting young, passionate engineers in the audience to send their resumes to him at Scaled Composites — but added that Mojave is just about the ugliest and worst place to live in the world. That’s an asset, he said, when you want to work on projects without a lot of outside interference.
