Legendary Engineer Cites Burnout, Pension

04.01.05 Special Edition: The legendary aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan shocked the industry Friday by announcing that he was closing the doors of his privately held design and engineering company, Scaled Composites.

Rutan has accepted a position as an Aerospace Engineer II with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where he will run lots of calculations for senior engineers. "I'm tired of doing all the hard thinking around here," Rutan told Aero-News. "Plus, the desert gets to a guy after a while. I'm ready for a change of pace."

Rutan is known far beyond the industry thanks to his world-circling Voyager and X-prize-winning SpaceShipOne, but he's also an icon to aviators thanks to his paradigm-breaking VariViggen and EZ series homebuilts, plans for which were sold in large quantities in the 1970s and 1980s.

"This just got to me, all these years of single-handedly having to keep the hope of space travel alive," Rutan said in an Aero-News exclusive interview. "I'm pretty much burnt out at Scaled. So I took a good long look at the opportunities at NASA. After all, the public sector employs a lot of engineers now, and they're not even flying! Imagine how much NASA will grow, if it ever does manned spaceflight again."

Was it the challenge of manned spaceflight that compelled Burt to move to NASA?

"Hell, no. We already did THAT at Scaled. It was the four weeks' paid vacation, and they have a pretty sweet pension plan, those federal workers. I mean, us federal workers. Sorry, I'm still getting used to it myself."

FMI: www.awholenewnasa.gov