Without the tools to create, where would we be? Listening to the sound of one hand clapping, probably. In this column we’ll be looking at people who invent their own tools—be they musical, artistic, photographic—any sort of bespoke equipment from innovative builders of all disciplines and ages in a celebration of the fine art of invention. This week: Elliot SeguinIn the middle of the Mojave Desert, a homebuilt revolution is taking place. Among garages and the personal hangars at aerospace company Scaled Composites’ airport, a group of people are leading the charge when it comes to DIY aircraft building. With advances in technology bringing the expense and, more importantly, the man hours needed to build aircraft down, we might be seeing the beginnings of a home-manufactured aerospace industry. Elliot Seguin is an engineer who is part of this scene and is excited about what’s taking place. By day, he’s a mild-mannered project engineer building exotic aircraft for various missions, but by night he’s homebuilding the future of air (and possibly space) travel. Utilizing his skills he and his friends have been building everything from electric aircraft, record setting and racing aircraft, commercial spaceships and everything in between.With home manufacturing being really big right now, led by developments in 3D printing, open source software, and the popularity of sites like Instructables and Make, it may be time we took to the skies to become those magnificent men (and women) in their self-built flying machines. At least, Seguin certainly thinks so.The Creators Project: What is it that you do?
Elliot Seguin: My job title here at Scaled is Project Engineer, which basically means I manage other engineers. Beyond being a project engineer I do flight test work, so that goes from writing the test plans all the way up to riding in the jet and acting those test plans out—so, running a piece of hardware or flying the jet or whatever.How did you get into homebuilding aircraft?
Well, the thing about Scaled Composites is that the company itself is rooted in homebuilt aviation. Our founder Burt Rutan is a famous homebuilt airplane designer and that’s how he sort of got on his feet. He got enough collateral together that he could get into proof of concept, prototype aircrafts for a living, and that’s what this company exists to do. Back in the late 70s/early 80s he kind of revolutionized using composites in order to build aircrafts in your garage. As a result, most of the engineers here at Scaled have roots in homebuilding.What do you think attracts people to homebuilding?
It’s about being able to touch the whole process. If you’re an engineer, you go to engineering school and you learn how to set up the problems, you learn how to look at the problem in terms of where the forces are, how those forces act and how you react to them. But that’s where the job skillset of an engineer ends, and then it maybe falls over to a fabricator or technician, someone who goes and builds those parts and gets those parts together on an airplane. And the next step you hand it over to a flight test group and the flight test group have the real fun and fly the airplane. But being a homebuilder, you get to do all those things. Not only do you get to do all those things but you get to do all those things in all the different parts of the airplane. So everything from flight controls to aerodynamics to structure to hydraulics to landing gear, and if you’re just totally geeked about airplanes, which typically the guys here are, then you get paid to learn about all the different parts of an airplane, which is just about as cool as it gets.What are the types of aircraft you build then? You mentioned spacecraft…
Right. The X Prize, which Scaled Composites won back in 2004, that was really the epitome of what can be done with a homebuilt airplane. That was all homebuilt technology, but going into space. There you’ve got one end of the spectrum, the other end of the spectrum are little gliders that guys build just so they’ve got enough airplane to haul one guy up in the air at 20mph and you find a mountain with some ridge lift and you don’t even need a motor, you just fly back and forth. Somewhere in the middle is something I do in my spare time, which is air racing, so we race airplanes with engines around telephone poles in the desert. That’s a whole other thing, but all these things are related and they’re all happening on this airport here in the Mojave Desert.Scaled Composites' SpaceShip One: Space fairing homebuilt, computer lofted, carbon fiber and epoxy designed and built in Mojave.
How are advances in technology affecting the homebuilding industry?
Well the problem, historically, with homebuilding or aircraft in general is that it’s about a 5000 hour problem. You know these little two seat 150-200mph cross-country machines? You’re looking at about 5000 hours. With kit planes where you can order a kit that comes pre-assembled and you have to assemble the rest of it, you can maybe get that down to 2000, maybe 1500. But you’re still talking a full year, and it’s hard to find people that are interested in investing those number of hours. So the problem with a kit plane is that you build a kit plane and it comes to you partially assembled, so you’re going to have the same kit plane as everybody else. Whereas the idea with homebuilding is to come up with something new, sort of a touchstone, something that’s very specific for your needs.With new technology it’s common for everyday people to have, obviously computers, but even the next step is CAD software: Computer-Aided Design 3D modelling. And then the next step is that with 3D 5-axis CNCs [computer numerical control] (above) you can, instead of taking all that time to model it and then take all that time again to make that airplane that shape in space, you can just send it to a computer. And the price of that is coming down very quickly because of CNCs coming from China and people setting up CNCs in their garage. If you look at the part of building a boat where you make the shape of the boat, there’s guys that spend their whole lives getting that shape, making the shape in space and it takes a long time to develop those skills. And if you can get a computer to do the same thing for an airplane or for anything, developing that skillset isn’t necessary. You can sort of skip that, walk right around it.The next one is CNC hot wiring, which is a whole other thing. It’s basically a piece of stainless steel safety wire that’s got electrical current running through it so it gets warm and you can cut foam with that. With real simple shapes you can cut them out of foam and literally just lay the composite material over the top and be flying in amazing record time. And I think that’s just the beginning of some of the developments we’ll see in the homebuilding industry because of modern computers. I think that’s going to allow the homebuilding industry to get much more creative.Does the 3D printing revolution that’s happening at the moment have any bearing on you?
Of course. But the problem with that stuff right now is the cost on that is still pretty high, so while it makes sense for little widgets, little tiny stuff, it doesn’t make sense for bigger stuff—but I’m sure the cost will come down. What it basically comes down to is you can sit at your computer and come up with the shape of your airplane and send that through the internet to someone who has that machine. They send you your airplane in three dimensional space and then you’ve got do whatever, sort the engine, and then you have your airplane. Which is so much better than spending 5000 hours carving foam and sanding… not that you’ll be able to get rid of all that work, but you’ll be able to drastically decrease it.Scaled Composites' Spaceship Two and White Knight Two: Commercial space tourism vehicle.Do you think this will open it up to real novices, say someone like me who has no engineering background?
The last time a revolution happened like this in homebuilding aviation was when my boss, Burt Rutan, made composites back in the 80s. And I think we’re at the precipice of a very similar thing right now.Is it a global thing?
It is global, but I would say the United States is a major hotspot and southern California is probably the bigger hotspot. But I think it could improve. I think that because the price of gas has gone up significantly in general aviation in the last 5 years or so, aviation is way down. It’s really going to take the electric airplane revolution, which I think is getting ready to happen, to get the price of operating down again. But, fundamentally, whether you’re building aeroplanes or you’re building cars, the new technology and all that stuff is still useful. That’s at least my justification for spending so much time building custom airplanes—that there’s going to be somebody that needs a custom something and the skills will be transferable just like the technology will be transferable.Do you think you can look at it as part of a wider DIY boom, fuelled by the internet? Taking manufacturing away from the bigger companies?
Exactly, that’s exactly it. We had Chris Anderson of Wired magazine and DIY Drones [here] just a month or two ago and he was really excited about what’s going on here. Because fundamentally, that’s the whole idea, you in your garage can make some little widget and the thought that that could eventually lead to a spaceship, I mean, that is just the most romantic thought anybody could have. And I see it only getting easier. As you say, as the internet connects the different people with the different machines and different resources to each other, then the different ideas can flow around and everybody benefits.What do you see as the implications of home building for spacecraft? What with NASA shutting down the space shuttle programme and all.
In homebuilding aviation the problem is time, but money is time, right? So the problem with space travel is the exorbitant costs, and what I think the commercial side, or our side of the industry can add to it, is come up with creative solutions to solve that cost problem. And certainly if you compare SpaceShipOne with an equivalent aircraft like an X-15, SpaceShipOne was several orders of magnitude cheaper to operate than the X-15. And I think that can be applied to the space problem in general. But obviously it’s way more complicated than an ultra light homebuilt airplane. So I don’t know, but I think it’s the best chance that humans in space have for the future.I mean, SpaceShipTwo has gotten complaints or flack in the press for being just a silly little toy and it doesn’t go as high as the space shuttle does. But I think the important thing there is that it lets people know that space travel can be routine. When we think of space travel we think of the moon landings, the space shuttle, we think of these huge projects with these huge budgets and these huge technical teams. What something like SpaceShipOne or SpaceShipTwo does is it brings it down to a level where we can manage it. We say, “you know, it really is just a pressure vessel, it really is just a rocket motor”—something that is way more complicated than the family car, but it’s not undoably complicated, it doesn’t have to be the lunar lander on the surface of the moon. It is fundamentally a simple problem and that’s what’s so exciting about it.
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Elliot Seguin: My job title here at Scaled is Project Engineer, which basically means I manage other engineers. Beyond being a project engineer I do flight test work, so that goes from writing the test plans all the way up to riding in the jet and acting those test plans out—so, running a piece of hardware or flying the jet or whatever.How did you get into homebuilding aircraft?
Well, the thing about Scaled Composites is that the company itself is rooted in homebuilt aviation. Our founder Burt Rutan is a famous homebuilt airplane designer and that’s how he sort of got on his feet. He got enough collateral together that he could get into proof of concept, prototype aircrafts for a living, and that’s what this company exists to do. Back in the late 70s/early 80s he kind of revolutionized using composites in order to build aircrafts in your garage. As a result, most of the engineers here at Scaled have roots in homebuilding.What do you think attracts people to homebuilding?
It’s about being able to touch the whole process. If you’re an engineer, you go to engineering school and you learn how to set up the problems, you learn how to look at the problem in terms of where the forces are, how those forces act and how you react to them. But that’s where the job skillset of an engineer ends, and then it maybe falls over to a fabricator or technician, someone who goes and builds those parts and gets those parts together on an airplane. And the next step you hand it over to a flight test group and the flight test group have the real fun and fly the airplane. But being a homebuilder, you get to do all those things. Not only do you get to do all those things but you get to do all those things in all the different parts of the airplane. So everything from flight controls to aerodynamics to structure to hydraulics to landing gear, and if you’re just totally geeked about airplanes, which typically the guys here are, then you get paid to learn about all the different parts of an airplane, which is just about as cool as it gets.
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Right. The X Prize, which Scaled Composites won back in 2004, that was really the epitome of what can be done with a homebuilt airplane. That was all homebuilt technology, but going into space. There you’ve got one end of the spectrum, the other end of the spectrum are little gliders that guys build just so they’ve got enough airplane to haul one guy up in the air at 20mph and you find a mountain with some ridge lift and you don’t even need a motor, you just fly back and forth. Somewhere in the middle is something I do in my spare time, which is air racing, so we race airplanes with engines around telephone poles in the desert. That’s a whole other thing, but all these things are related and they’re all happening on this airport here in the Mojave Desert.Scaled Composites' SpaceShip One: Space fairing homebuilt, computer lofted, carbon fiber and epoxy designed and built in Mojave.
Well the problem, historically, with homebuilding or aircraft in general is that it’s about a 5000 hour problem. You know these little two seat 150-200mph cross-country machines? You’re looking at about 5000 hours. With kit planes where you can order a kit that comes pre-assembled and you have to assemble the rest of it, you can maybe get that down to 2000, maybe 1500. But you’re still talking a full year, and it’s hard to find people that are interested in investing those number of hours. So the problem with a kit plane is that you build a kit plane and it comes to you partially assembled, so you’re going to have the same kit plane as everybody else. Whereas the idea with homebuilding is to come up with something new, sort of a touchstone, something that’s very specific for your needs.
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Of course. But the problem with that stuff right now is the cost on that is still pretty high, so while it makes sense for little widgets, little tiny stuff, it doesn’t make sense for bigger stuff—but I’m sure the cost will come down. What it basically comes down to is you can sit at your computer and come up with the shape of your airplane and send that through the internet to someone who has that machine. They send you your airplane in three dimensional space and then you’ve got do whatever, sort the engine, and then you have your airplane. Which is so much better than spending 5000 hours carving foam and sanding… not that you’ll be able to get rid of all that work, but you’ll be able to drastically decrease it.Scaled Composites' Spaceship Two and White Knight Two: Commercial space tourism vehicle.Do you think this will open it up to real novices, say someone like me who has no engineering background?
The last time a revolution happened like this in homebuilding aviation was when my boss, Burt Rutan, made composites back in the 80s. And I think we’re at the precipice of a very similar thing right now.Is it a global thing?
It is global, but I would say the United States is a major hotspot and southern California is probably the bigger hotspot. But I think it could improve. I think that because the price of gas has gone up significantly in general aviation in the last 5 years or so, aviation is way down. It’s really going to take the electric airplane revolution, which I think is getting ready to happen, to get the price of operating down again. But, fundamentally, whether you’re building aeroplanes or you’re building cars, the new technology and all that stuff is still useful. That’s at least my justification for spending so much time building custom airplanes—that there’s going to be somebody that needs a custom something and the skills will be transferable just like the technology will be transferable.Do you think you can look at it as part of a wider DIY boom, fuelled by the internet? Taking manufacturing away from the bigger companies?
Exactly, that’s exactly it. We had Chris Anderson of Wired magazine and DIY Drones [here] just a month or two ago and he was really excited about what’s going on here. Because fundamentally, that’s the whole idea, you in your garage can make some little widget and the thought that that could eventually lead to a spaceship, I mean, that is just the most romantic thought anybody could have. And I see it only getting easier. As you say, as the internet connects the different people with the different machines and different resources to each other, then the different ideas can flow around and everybody benefits.What do you see as the implications of home building for spacecraft? What with NASA shutting down the space shuttle programme and all.
In homebuilding aviation the problem is time, but money is time, right? So the problem with space travel is the exorbitant costs, and what I think the commercial side, or our side of the industry can add to it, is come up with creative solutions to solve that cost problem. And certainly if you compare SpaceShipOne with an equivalent aircraft like an X-15, SpaceShipOne was several orders of magnitude cheaper to operate than the X-15. And I think that can be applied to the space problem in general. But obviously it’s way more complicated than an ultra light homebuilt airplane. So I don’t know, but I think it’s the best chance that humans in space have for the future.I mean, SpaceShipTwo has gotten complaints or flack in the press for being just a silly little toy and it doesn’t go as high as the space shuttle does. But I think the important thing there is that it lets people know that space travel can be routine. When we think of space travel we think of the moon landings, the space shuttle, we think of these huge projects with these huge budgets and these huge technical teams. What something like SpaceShipOne or SpaceShipTwo does is it brings it down to a level where we can manage it. We say, “you know, it really is just a pressure vessel, it really is just a rocket motor”—something that is way more complicated than the family car, but it’s not undoably complicated, it doesn’t have to be the lunar lander on the surface of the moon. It is fundamentally a simple problem and that’s what’s so exciting about it.