Shuttlecocks and Rocket Ships

By Mark Fox

Burt Rutan is known as the aviation god responsible for creating all kinds of freaky planes. He created the Voyager, the first plane to fly around the world on a single tank of fuel, among many other revolutionary and record-breaking experimental aircrafts.

In the fall of 2004, Rutan and his team won the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award to the first civilian company that could launch the equivalent of three people into space twice within 14 days.

Many people believe that the propulsion or rocket forces would be the biggest technological issue to overcome, but much of that technology was borrowed from other sources. One of the biggest obstacles for Rutan's SpaceShipOne flight was re-entry.

When an object is going 20,000 to 25,000 miles per hour in orbit, it will literally slam into the atmosphere upon re-entry. The vehicle hits the atmosphere extremely hard and fast and slows down very quickly over a short amount of time, which creates a great deal of heat. Although there were proven re-entry systems that Rutan's team could have utilized, the current systems were too heavy for his aircraft.

To solve this problem, Burt asked himself, "Rather than slamming on the brakes, what would happen if I tapped them instead? What if I reenter over a much longer period of time and make re-entry a slower process to give time for the heat to bleed off?" He figured that if he could accomplish that goal, he could apply a much lighter thermal protection system that would not weigh down the craft. However, no such re-entry process existed.

To solve his problem, Burt looked to the sports world. He thought about basketball, baseball, and football, but he really hit the gold mine when he considered a badminton birdie.

When you play badminton, you hit the birdie as hard as you can. The birdie flies up to the top of the net and then falls at a slow, controlled speed. The flight pattern of the birdie gave Rutan a design parameter for SpaceShipOne. The birdie enabled Rutan to not only come up with a lightweight reentry system, but also to design the craft as such that it dramatically simplifies the pilot's role upon reentry. The craft could basically navigate itself because of the aerodynamically stable design.

The SpaceShipOne technology is now licensed for use in a fleet of commercial spacecraft. The technology will be utilized by Virgin Galactic, a company that aims to be the first space tourism company to provide sub-orbital flights to the public.

The Ansari X Prize competition was designed to spur civilian spaceflight innovation, but ten million is a measly prize when you consider that NASA does not have the capabilities to complete this feat - and a NASA shuttle launch costs something like a $ billion each!

Think about that for a moment. One of the biggest technological accomplishments of our lifetime was solved by a fifty cent badminton birdie.

Whether Burt was consciously doing it or not, he was using a creative thinking tool called "Random Entry." This is where you take a seemingly unrelated word or concept and study it in detail to find the connections. To find the similarities. Random Entry stimulus is every where. You are surrounded by it. You just have to open your eyes.

Some of the simplest ways to get this random stimulus is to pick a word, picture, or object. Randomly point to a word in a book or newspaper. Type in a word in Google and click on the images tab. Pick any picture. What does that image make you think of relative to new solutions to your problem? As far as objects; Pick anything around you.

What can you create using existing technologies and ideas? Do you think that your creativity might one day change the world?

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