[miketwalker]

Paul Allen (the co-founder of Microsoft) is the one who is sponsoring Spaceshipone. I have read up a few things, and found many people estimating that so far they've spent aboiut $30-40 million on their project. However, considering it costs $500 million to launch a shuttle.... that's pretty $@#$@#$@#$@# good. I do agree that this has very good potential for making it better for industry to launch satellites... as well as for research groups to perform more experiments since it will be much cheaper/easier to launch them.