Clark Lindsey opens up on Mr. Bell over at Hobbyspace RLV News. Among other things he notes are that:

...someone should send Bell a link to ZERO-G. He should also be told never to ride on a 777 or the future Boeing 7E7 since they are 12% and 50% composite, respectively. He should certainly never launch any science payloads on the Orbital Sciences Pegasus, which was designed in partnership with Scaled Composites and which is built with components from the company.

To which I would add that aside from demonstrating his near-total ignorance of commercial zero-gravity flight, composite construction, and Rutan's history in aerospace work, Mr. Bell also manages to overstate the energy required for orbit by a factor of two, makes absurd statements such as "The air-launched rocketplane configuration reached its natural performance limits" with 50-year-old technology, and manages to imply that SpaceShipOne never even reached quote-Space-unquote, and that Rutan and company are in fact running a devious scam:

SS1 is really a stuntplane intended to whip up public interest and favorable news media coverage. Everything about the project -- the rat-shack high desert Right Stuff ambiance of Mohave, the air-launch format, the cute round portholes, even the 63-year-old test pilot -- is carefully calculated to push the "spend money" buttons in the brains of the aging Baby Boomers who are the only sane people who still have a romantic passion for space travel.

What an unmitigated ass. Rutan works in a rat-shack in the Mojave (which Mr. Bell is consistently incapable of spelling) because that's where he's ALWAYS worked; the air-launch format was chosen because Burt is very comfortable designing airplanes; the cute round portholes were driven by financial and weight considerations relating to basic material scaling laws (tensile strength at a given thickness decreasing with the square of the radius); and the 63-year old test pilot has ALWAYS been Burt's test pilot, as well as his best friend. To suggest that all of these things were "carefully calculated to push the 'spend money' buttons" is vicious, disingenuous, and just plain wrong.

Way in the distance, Mr. Bell does have a handful of valid points relating to the scalability of winged air-launch systems, and the desirability of orbital ballistic capsules, but these good points are insignificant compared to overwhelming stench of willful ignorance and outright malice which pervades this piece.

Yeah, he got my goat good,

Nathan.