[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Cory

Does anyone else find it slightly scary that COMPANIES will be building rockets to put normal people in space?

Not at all. Successful companies are in the business of making money. Injuring (or killing) their customers is something they tend to avoid.

I mean, I'm all for innovation and pushing the envelope, but god knows how safe company xyz's rocket is. NASA does more testing than anyone could even imagine... and the price of one shuttle is astronomically high. One has to wonder how safe these things will be.

SpaceShipOne is more like an airplane than a typical NASA spacecraft. It's a whole lot easier to test something when you can do it incrementally, without needing to have everything work absolutely correctly the first time. The entire point of the X Prize was to bring about completely reusable spacecraft.

There better be some serious regulation and oversight on these bad boys.

There have been literally years of work put in by people in industry and government, working out appropriate models for regulating an emerging private space access market. One of the problems to be avoided is excessively restricting it too early and thus keeping it from developing at all. The rules for reusable spacecraft aren't going to be specifying anything much more rigorous than existing regulations for experimental aircraft anytime soon.