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I've been lucky enough to have flown some very interesting aircraft in the past, but SpaceShipTwo is far and away the most exciting of them all.

For the industry we're starting now, for suborbital flight, there is no destination, so the spacecraft you go up in has to be large and spacious. That's why SpaceShipTwo is much bigger than SpaceShipOne: It needs to be because you want those six people to be floating around and enjoying themselves.

Virgin Galactic, which will be operating SpaceShipTwo, will be only one of several spacelines. The competitors for Virgin include the Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, and possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And likely a couple of others who are smart enough not to tell people what they are doing!

It's really kind of a challenge to keep coordinated with the two station crews that we'll be interacting with. And of course one of them launched quite some time before our mission.

It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.

Since the littoral combat ship plays a vital role, we want to make sure we're buying the correct version.

Delay is the enemy of progress.

There's going to be space travel at some point.

Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.

One day's delay is another day's lack of progress.