Alan Bock Sr. editorial writer The Orange County Register abock@ocregister.com

Burt Rutan may have secured his place in space flight history last Oct. 4, when SpaceShipOne captured the Ansari X-Prize of $10 million by flying with a pilot and enough ballast for a passenger beyond the atmosphere, within two weeks of having done it before. But he had already become a legendary aircraft and aerospace designer - 38 new airplane designs in 30 years in the business - and his ideas about the future are almost enough to make you gasp.

Rutan, who spoke at a Reason Foundation gathering in Orange County earlier this month, believes suborbital space tourism will become a big industry, and sooner rather than later.

That's important because "you've got to have thousands, tens of thousands, of people enjoying it in order to figure out what to do with it," he told Reason magazine's Ted Balaker in a recent interview. "We never would have invented the use of the Internet, the communication and the commerce, and everything if you had just a few dozen people with computers." That could lead to much more extensive exploration of space, and an environment in which ordinary people, not just a few dozen government-designated professional pilots and scientists, will enjoy space travel.

Is the interest there? When I drove to the Mojave airport last October to watch that historic flight I was astounded at the size of the crowd. The press contingent was large enough for a presidential inauguration or political convention. I didn't talk to all of them, but I'd venture that almost all of those thousands want to take a space flight sometime, and not just for a few seconds. (My boss actually volunteered in the early 1980s to be a "Journalist in Space," a program that was scuttled after the Challenger disaster. I'd like to do it myself.)

The terms of the X-Prize were designed to create incentives to build a reusable, potentially commercial spacecraft rather than something that would consume months or even years between flights. Rutan won $25 million in backing from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in part by having a record of innovation. His Voyager aircraft, now on permanent display at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, was the first to fly around the world without refueling, completing the nine-day flight in December 1986.

SpaceShipOne is going to the Smithsonian, too. But first, Rutan will take it to the elementary school in Ohio he attended. Kids under 12 will be invited to touch it - for a reason. "Kids need to have hopes and dreams," he told an audience at the Reason Weekend in Dana Point for friends of that magazine and foundation recently. "All the first space pioneers were kids during the first exciting burst of airplane development. Lately kids haven't had the feeling that they could be part of exploring space unless they were one of the select few."

Government tends to call space vehicles "modules," "capsules" or "craft." "But I think kids want to fly in a space ship," Rutan says. So that's what he called his vehicle.

Not only did Allen agree to bankroll the SpaceShipOne project, Richard Branson, the charmingly eccentric entrepreneur behind Virgin Airways and other enterprises, announced in Mojavethe day SpaceShipOne succeeded that he was ordering several of the next design - a multi-passenger spacecraft suitable for tourist flight. Branson thinks he'll not only make history but make money doing so.

Rutan agrees. "Within five years we'll have quite expensive space tourism flights," he predicted. "Two to three years after that they'll be much more widely affordable." He predicts that 80,000 people will have flown in space in the next 10 years or so. After that competition will make it progressively cheaper.

Since he's looking at a new industry, he emphasizes that it will have to be much safer - by a factor of at least 100 - than the government's space program has been. He notes that the government has averaged one fatality per 62 flights, whereas in the early days of the air travel - when planes were much more fragile than they are now - there was one fatality per 31,000 flights. Commercial space travel will have to be at least that safe if not safer.

In 30 years and with 38 brand-new designs, Rutan has yet to lose or even seriously injure a pilot during a flight.

The other thing is that he's upfront about is that the early flights will be mainly for fun. "Quite frankly, we don't know what space flight is for," he told the Reason audience. "We'll find out when thousands of people have done it and I have dozens of competitors."

He reminded us that in the early days of computers people didn't know what they were really for either. People talked about balancing their checkbooks, but few used them for that. Instead they played games and played with the computer's capabilities. They had fun. Then they discovered practical uses.

"But computers didn't become really practical until everybody had one and the Internet was expanded," he said.

It was a progression that neither computer giant IBM nor the government successfully predicted.

He also has some more serious analysis of the fact that since space flight has been a government monopoly there has been a severe deficit in innovation. Beyond his charming habit of pronouncing NASA as "naysay," which delighted the large crowd in Mojave and the smaller crowd at the Reason Weekend, he marshals facts and figures.

In 1908, he notes, only 10 pilots had flown airplanes. By 1912, thousands of pilots in 39 countries had flown dozens of different models. That was before mail planes, before World War I demonstrated military uses for airplanes, long before there was a commercial airline industry, and long before the development of practical jet planes.

By contrast, in the first year after Russian Yuri Gagarin ventured into space, there were five manned space flights. In 2004, 44 years later, there were five manned space flights, "two in Russia and three in Mohave."

That's because when government runs a program it virtually stifles innovation, because innovation involves risk, since most proposed innovations don't work. Thus the innovation cycle disappears. "You need competition and mistakes for useful innovations to prove themselves, and that can happen only in the private sector," Rutan insists.

"We need the atmosphere of 1909, when hundreds of people figured that if a couple of bicycle shop guys from Ohio could do it, they could do it too," Rutan said. "I hope that hundreds of people figure that if that Rutan guy can do it, they can do it too. There's a lot going on even now that you haven't heard about."

SpaceShipOne incorporated three brand-new technologies (the government is still using 1950s technology). Perhaps the most exciting was the "feather re-entry," where the wings are angled - adjusted pneumatically rather than electrically because electric systems are more prone to problems - and the vehicle becomes (my analogy, not Rutan's) a bit like badminton shuttlecock that automatically turns over and rights itself for re-entry. Rutan's people also developed their own rocket technology, where "the fuel is rubberand laughing gas - nothing dangerous." The cabin is also not pressurized.

Rutan believes if space flight is safe, the money will be there; his own situation tends to bear him out. He says he has three groups that want to fund 100 percent of the next project, none of whom he solicited. His company, Scaled Composites, will be picking one soon. Few entrepreneurs have that luxury, but Rutan observes that "when you're begging for money, you'll often take it even if the terms aren't right, which is why most entrepreneurs fail."

A technological innovator who's an unaplogetic and successful entrepreneur who sincerely hopes there will be dozens more like him, some of whom will outstrip his accomplishments? We could use more people like Burt Rutan.