SpaceX is commercializing technology that we've been hammering out since Project Mercury in the late 1950s.
Well if you put it that way, SpaceshipOne is just a bigger version of X-15 from the 1950's also.
You know what it looks like to me? It looks like SpaceX's dotcom billionaire (Elon Musk) put everything he has on the line - his fortune, his time, energy, everything - whereas Virgin Galactic's dotcom billionaire (Paul Allen) put a little bit of a seed money, and that's about it. Burt Rutan retired already, he doesn't seem to be burning the midnight oil either. The whole thing seems to be kind of coasting without a lot of funding or urgency.
Burt Rutan is retired. Spacecraft One represents new technology. It's interesting to note that a suborbital flight with Virgin Galactic costs about $200,000. SpaceX is "reducing" the cost of orbiting an astronaut to about $20,000,000 per seat. Reaching orbit is more difficult / expensive, but not by a factor of 100. It's the difference between a conventional rocket / capsule like the Dragon / Falcon SpaceX design and Rutan's Spacecraft Two.
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