- Born
- Burt Rutan was born on June 17, 1943 in Portland, Oregon, USA. He is an actor, known for Vanna Bonta: What Goes Up (2005), Looking Up, Way Up! The Burt Rutan Story and Reaching for the Skies (1987).
- Designed the first aircraft (named "voyager") to fly around the world non-stop without refueling in 1986.
- Winner of the 10 million dollar X-prize competition in 2004 for putting the first privately built aircraft in to sub-orbital space. Within two weeks his aircraft named "Spaceship One" made two flights above 62 miles in altitude, reaching zero gravity and was capable of carrying the pilot and two passengers.
- Has nearly forty original flight patents, including SpaceShipOne and its support vehicle White Knight, the first privately built aircraft to reach suborbital space.
- Designed the Voyager aircraft flown by his brother, pilot Dick Rutan, in December 1986. Along with co-pilot Jeana Yeager, they set a record for flying around the world without stopping or refueling.
- When there's ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was "well, that's nonsense!", so what that means is that a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.
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