Re: Rutan's X Prize design?
This aircraft has shown up in Aviation Week, and others have drawn similar conclusions about its use. I wish I could link a photo here, but they're all on the AvWeek subscription site and don't work here. I couldn't even save the picture to a file, although I easily plucked it out of my cache file. There is nothing about this that I can find at the Scaled web site, and it's obvious that Scaled is trying to keep it under wraps.
Sufficiently inspired people can check out the plane in the World News Roundup in the Aug. 5, 2002 issue.
It is a real plane, and has been test flown.