With Any Luck, By The Time Nasa's

At Various Times Over 20 Years, I Did Preliminary Designs For Aircraft Like The Stratolaunch. For That Whole Time I Was Encouraging Us To Do Something That Almost Everyone Else Felt You Could Not Do.

When You Have A Transportation System That The Price Of Propellant Is Essentially Negligible Something Is Very Wrong. If You Look At Any Other Transportation System, A Car, A Motorcycle, A Train, An Oil Tanker, An Airliner, You Name It; About A Quarter To A Third Of The Operating Cost Is Buying The Propellant.

Virgin Galactic, Which Will Be Operating Spaceshiptwo, Will Be Only One Of Several Spacelines. The Competitors For Virgin Include The Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, And Possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And Likely A Couple Of Others Who Are Smart Enough Not To Tell People What They Are Doing!

There Will Be A New Industry, And We Are Just Now In The Beginning. I Will Predict That In Twelve Or Fifteen Years There Will Be Tens Of Thousands, Maybe Even Hundreds Of Thousands Of People, That Fly And See That Black Sky.

Testing Leads To Failure, And Failure Leads To Understanding