Burt Rutan

Burt Rutan strikes me as a genuine original, the rare engineer whose aircraft look as radical as the ideas behind them. The Voyager flying around the world nonstop and unrefueled in 1986 still sounds borderline impossible, and that single feat would have made a career. But the wall of honors, the National Aviation Hall of Fame, the Daniel Guggenheim Medal, the Presidential Citizens Medal, tells me he kept pushing boundaries for decades. What I admire most is the obsession with light, efficient, unconventional design. From small-town Oregon and Cal Poly, he became someone who genuinely reshaped how people imagine flight, both atmospheric and beyond.

Name (English)

Burt Rutan

Name (Japanese)

バート・ルータン

Reading

ばーと・るーたん

Born

June 17, 1943 (age 83)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Gemini / Goat

Origin

Estacada, Oregon, United States

Occupation

military flight engineer / inventor / aircraft pilot / entrepreneur / engineer

University

California Polytechnic State University

Awards & achievements

• Presidential Citizens Medal
• 2011 Daniel Guggenheim Medal
• 1995 National Aviation Hall of Fame
• 2007 honorary doctorate of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
• 2005 J. C. Hunsaker Award in Aeronautical Engineering
• 2007 NSS Wernher Von Braun Memorial Award
• 2015 Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy

Motto

Private

• Official sitehttps://www.burtrutan.com/
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%90%E3%83%BC%E3%83%88%E3%83%BB%E3%83%AB%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BF%E3%83%B3

Tags

• Oregon
• military flight engineer
• inventor
• aircraft pilot

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.