This paragraph caught my eye:

In September, news emerged that Robert Bigelow, who runs Bigelow Aerospace, a firm based in Los Angeles, was going to back a $50m prize modelled on the $10m Ansari X prize that led to the creation of SpaceShipOne. This prize is for a manned vehicle that is able to reach an altitude of 400km and complete two orbits of the Earth. It must then repeat this feat within 60 days. And it must do it by the end of 2010. Whether $50m is a big enough incentive is doubtful. Even Mr Rutan, who knows a thing or two about cheap and cheerful spaceflight, thinks it would cost around $400m-500m, and 5-7 years, to get a new craft into orbit. He cannot try though, as he is signed up with Virgin for the next two years. So who else would be interested?

First, I wonder if Burt signed an exclusive contract to work on Branson's Virgin Galactic. Somehow, I doubt it, especially given his known work on other projects like RASCAL. I suspect Burt will oversee the overall design and development work but leave the day-to-day construction to his employees.

Still, if Burt is working exclusively on Virgin Galactic, it reminds me of a historical parallel from aviation. Back in the early 1930s, Boeing developed a revolutionary airliner called the 247. In a day of fairly course trimotor airliners like the Ford Trimotor, the 247 was a streamlined twin-engined monoplane with retractable landing gear, NACA cowlings, autopilots, variable pitch propellors, smooth surfaces, and other modern features. It was faster than many of America's front line fighters of the day. It was so much more efficient than other airliners that everyone wanted one. United Airlines placed a large order for 247s, so large that no one else would be able to get one for a couple years. Instead of being shut out, the other airlines went to another company to see what they could do. The company was Douglas Aircraft, who had just completed a competing aircraft called the DC-1. That prototype led to the larger and better DC-2, which in turn led to the even better DC-3. The DC-2 was considerably better than the 247 and the orders poured in. In the end, thousands of DC-3s were built and were the defacto airliner around the world for years to come.

So, if Burt did sign an exclusive contract (which I doubt), then he has left a large market opening for someone to skip the suborbital market and go after the LEO market. It'll be interesting to see if history repeats itself. In that excellent Discovery Channel program "Black Sky", Burt was already studying designs that could achieve orbit. It wouldn't surprise me if he could make that 2010 deadline if he gets the funding.

Oh, if $200K is too much in 2007 (it is for me), just wait a few more years. Some estimate the price will be considerably cheaper after a few years of operations. I've heard guesses as "low" as $20,000 but nothing definitive.