David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…There were a few credible. I spent a bunch of time and actually went and read the whole How to Make a Spaceship book. There were several credible teams, but the only one that got really, really close and the only one sort of left standing by the end of the competition was Rutan, so we should give credit where credit is due to some of the other international teams that did pretty amazing things. Okay, great. Well, this team led by aviation pioneer—probably everyone listening here live with us will know and know well—Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, enters the competition. Burt is a total legend in the aerospace industry. He had founded Scaled in 1982. Burt had been a former Air Force test pilot but was this legendary independent airplane designer. He designed the record-breaking Voyager aircraft, which, for folks who have been to the Air and Space Museum in Washington—it’s hanging there (I think) right in the atrium when you walk in—in 1986 was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, which is just incredible. Scaled, interestingly, the company he had founded in 1982 had a long, storied M&A history of its own. It was bought in 1985 by a company called Beech Aircraft, which they’re collaborating with to design a plane at the time. Then, Beech was owned by Raytheon, so Scaled was owned by Raytheon. After a while—I think this was post-Voyager—Burt bought it back from Raytheon, then sold it again to a company called Wyman-Gordon. They got acquired. Burt bought it back again, this time with some financing from Northrop Grumman, who was already an investor—later we’ll see the story—and Northrop ends up acquiring Scaled fully itself. That’s why the company lives today. This company’s been independent, it’s been part of Raytheon, it’s been independent again, it’s now part of Northrop; kind of amazing, and to speak to the talent of both Burton and the team. Totally, and it’s not called Scaled Composites by accident. The thing that they’re really good at is coming up with these really innovative designs, and then using incredibly lightweight materials, composites to basically create aircrafts that people didn’t think were possible or that use less fuel, that do more things, and frankly just push the edge of applying cool principles of aerospace and physics to figure out what new goals you can accomplish. Many of the Scaled planes are ones where you kind of look at funny at first and then they go on to achieve something that humans didn’t really think was possible until they were able to do it.…

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