Burt Rutan: What the hell have we been doing?

Burt Rutan, speaking at the National Space Society’s 2005 conference, takes NASA to task for decades without meaningful progress in manned spaceflight. Powerful words from the man who designed, built, and successfully launched his own spacecraft on more flights that year than all other space programs combined.

Duration 0:52:40

[The SR-71 and Concorde] went all the way through their life cycle until they got too rusty to maintain, and got shut down and we retreated back to the same performance, military and commercial, that we had in 1960. Guys, that was 45 years ago. Now go back from 1960, 45 years earlier when airplanes were biplanes with fabric wings and wooden propellers. What the hell have we been doing? –B. Rutan