Burt Rutan visioi tulevaisuuteen - jopa bisnesmatkustuksen loppumiseen

[Ilkka Mäkelä 1 216]

Professional Pilotin artikkelista, jossa puhutaan Intercontinental Range Business Jeteistä ja SuperSonicBusinessJeteistä ja ylipäänsä yksityisen bisnesmatkustamisen tulevaisuudesta, poimittu seuraava pätkä:

 

Burt Rutan, mies joka on tähän mennessä tehnyt sen, minkä on luvannut, eli put his money where his mouth is, sanoo artikkelissa seuraavaa:

 

Scaled Composites founder Burt Rutan recommends not getting overly excited about the prospect of SSBJs and hypersonic aircraft. "With virtual reality possibilities, we´re not going to need to depend on physical travel", he says.

 

Burt Rutan believes that today´s much-ballyhooed SSBJs are not the final answer. "In a relatively short period of time - maybe 15 to 20 years - I believe we´re going to fly hypersonic and we´ll look at SSBJs as not having been a necessary intermediate step. We´ll bounce across the top of the atmosphere at Mach 5-6 or do suborbital lobs flying weightless. Travel time may be reduced to as little as 60 minutes anywhere on Earth".

 

Further into the future, Rutan believes that even extensive hypersonic and LEO (= Low Earth Orbit) travel will be shortlived, at least compared with our current 55-year experience with jet travel. Seamless virtual reality travel, says Rutan, could almost completely do away with the need and desire "to be there".

 

Rutan predicts, "within 25 years, virtual reality meetings will be essentially transparent to being there in person. Once we can do this, the idea of climbing into an aircraft, and burning huge quantities of fossil fuels to propel our bodies and briefcases full of papers, will seem absolutely backward. The future I envision will involve instantaneous virtual meetings as the norm, along with a limited level of physical travel outside the atmosphere aboard very fast transports that will land at docking stations very close to where we´re trying to go."

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