Stuart O. Witt

Transcription

To most people, Kitty Hawk, NC, was just a wasteland But to two brothers who were bicycle mechanics from Dayton, OH, it was perfect Absolutely perfect The steady breeze The shortened runway They had soft sand for landing Those same elements are alive and well in Mojave today We have access to a piece of airspace that's a national treasure That's about 200 nautical miles by 200 nautical miles and it goes from the surface essentially to the moon I don't know of another place that has that type of geography in this industry anywhere on earth We have a decided advantage just because of our location right here in Mojave, plus we have the right attitude in the aerospace valley that this is just what we do In Mojave, we have this cluster of highly talented, innovative people They're still fifth graders in a lot of ways They don't know what they can't do And so they're not afraid to try things And they try things everyday that don't work in hopes that they'll try something that does work It's more of a mindset, it's more of a what's inside that's driving these people Jeff Greason, he was co-patentholder of the Intel Pentium III chip. What credentials does he have to come to Mojave, set up shop, and become a rocket scientist of a leading sub-orbital and orbital systems developer? Well, the same argument could be made of Orville and Wilbur. What on earth did two bicycle builders have in terms of credentials to build the first vehicle to engage in flight, and then powered flight? The goal of XCOR is to try to bring the cost and frequency of space transportation to a point where we can make economic use of space. Lynx is our name of the suborbital spacecraft that we're developing and have been for a number of years It's a small ship that takes the pilot and one person or the pilot and a payload from the runway up into the space environment and back down to land again Our work is inspired by the same ethos that fueled Silicon Valley in its early days and that competitive but also collaborative atmosphere drives us all to move more swiftly That is that "Wright Brothers Effect" carried into several different organizations on the flight-line And when you look in the eyes of people like George Whitesides George could have probably been successful in any one of fifty industries just like Jeff Greason But they chose this one The mission of Virgin Galactic is to open space for the rest of us So our aspiration is to bring the price down of space access and to open up the space experience to dramatically more people around the world Right now our company is doing two different things One is we're trying to finish flight tests for our SpaceShipTwo vehicle which will bring thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of people into space And we're also building a new small satellite launch vehicle called LauncherOne which will take small satellites up into orbit Mojave is the perfect place for us because it is the center of aerospace entrepreneurial development If you go around the world, there's really nowhere else you can design, build, install, and test space equipment all in the same place Literally Mojave is the only place in the world that I think you can do all of those things at once It's very simple We now have seventeen companies We have nineteen rocket test sites We have a hundred and fifty five basic contracts with different firms This is the first time in the history of this airport in forty years that the space industry now generates fifty percent of our total revenue And that's a big deal Kevin Mickey grew up in this town and now he's back as the President and CEO of Scaled Composites He carries on that legacy and, if you will, was passed a baton by Burt Rutan and now look what's going on at Scaled. We excel at rapid prototyping and flight tests What we pursue is major milestone breakthrough projects and that can be in aviation or now in space Our most recent program is the program that you see behind us called Stratolaunch And the program is to create the world's largest wingspan airplane that would carry a booster to roughly 30,000 feet Drop that off and then the booster would take payloads or passengers on to space The enemy of innovation is the intolerance for risk and some failure And the Mojave Air & Space Port with our partner Stu Witt, the general manager of the airport He's created an environment out here where we can do things in a way that you couldn't do them anywhere else in the country There's only one way to be totally safe And that's stop But where does that put humanity? There's something in the human spirit that wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves We can't lose sight of that And that's where this industry is It would be very easy to just accept the fact that we went to the moon, in my lifetime and in my lifetime, we abandoned the moon I'm not willing to accept that Something is happening here You can feel it There's just a crackle There's something in the air I want to be able to look people in the eye and say "I was there, were you?"