Space

Burt Rutan likes JPL!

Discover Magazine has an interview with Burt Rutan, he of SpaceShipOne fame.

NASA does hundreds of wonderful things. They send robots all
over the solar system. They have scientists doing all kinds of stuff.
Some of it is good work. The stuff that JPL [the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California] does is fabulous work.

…But I have a tremendous amount of respect for what JPL does. NASA did
some phenomenal research during the 1960s in response to [Yuri] Gagarin
[the first cosmonaut], and very quickly we were driving cars and playing
golf on the moon. That is something that made me very proud to be an
American who sent taxpayer funds to that NASA.

So I guess we escape his disdain for the general NASA, a.k.a nay-say, culture. I wrote about my feelings on his nickname back when I saw SpaceShipOne fly.

As soon as I make my second million, though, I’m signing up with Virgin Galactic.