Burt Rutan is the man.

Courtesy Scaled Composites

Watched a replay of the documentary on SpaceShipOne the other night. Gave me chills all over again. It is pretty impressive to think what they have accomplished. It's also a slap in the face to NASA.

Sure, one might argue that Mr. Rutan has technological benifits that NASA didn't have. That's a valide excuse in the previous century. But not now. And yet NASA seems to keep making the same mistakes.

I believe NASA's biggest problem has always been too much "engineering for the sake of engineering". Poor leadership allows engineers to design solutions that are more complex than the problem calls for. The KISS priciple is a foreign concept.

I appreciate the accomplishment of the Space Shuttle, but think it was a bad idea from the start. Why in the world would we want to build such a hugely complex machine to achieve low earth orbit, considering the multiple points for potential failure? Way too complex.

It's no wonder Russia and China prefer the capsule. It's simple and reliable. Proven technology. It is self-righting during reentry. Has a one-piece heat shield. Has a crew escape (ejection) system. How can you compete with that?

So, someone at NASA wakes up and embraces the capsule design once more. Now we have the CEV on its way. Much better. But still sounds vastly more complex than it needs to be. And if they even think about putting tiles on the bottom of that thing, I will completely declare NASA's manned space program a complete failure. Victim of politics and over engineering.

But, hopefully not. I will hold my breath and wait for a solid, one-piece heat shield.

Now, Mr. Rutan is on his way toward Tier Two. This will expand his craft's capabilities to earth orbit. I'm extremely curious how he plans to maintain his current space ship design, and create a variant that will survive reentry at those speeds. Very excited to see the results.

I know he is still working on the next phase of Tier One, but hopefully we will be seeing some preliminary design work on Tier Two. Hopefully.

With this said, my hat's off to the guy at NASA that invited Mr. Rutan to comment on the CEV. He is a valuable national resource that everyone should recognize. You gotta have someone with an agenda driven only by the desire for safe "no frills" spaceflight, free from political pressure, to get good guidance and sound advice for the future of our crippled, manned program.

I prefer sound, proven solutions. Mr. Rutan, however, has criticized the CEV program for not being risky enough. Somewhere in the middle there is an opportunity to move forward. But if we are going to take more risks, lets actually achieve something more than yet another low-earth orbit flight. Greater risk should yield greater returns, right?