The test pilot of Burt Rutan's suicide machine should keep an image in his mind of his space ship approaching the earth at a random angle of attack and a whole cluster of problems arising from the fact that he will be able to do nothing about it because in order to save weight Burt Rutan did not put attitude control jets on his space ship. Burt's test pilot, passengers, had better be strapped in pretty good, the fuel tanks near empty when that bird gets to the high point of its sub-orbit because if it starts to tumble for any reason the pilot will not be able to do anything about the situation until he starts to hit real air very fast, and by that point there may not be any set of stick and rudder maneuvers that will have any positive effect on restoring the pilots control of the bird.
If SpaceShipOne starts to tumble at the high point of its sub-orbit, the ship, the pilot, and the passengers are going to become an incinerated meat byproduct.
Burt is a great Aeronautical engineer, but from what I have seen of his space ship he does not understand what it is going to take to put living meat in earth orbit and bring it back down on a re-usable space ship.
The space shuttle is little more than an expensive aging suicide machine. The Federal government has spent billions of dollars on the program, and it is time to shut the space shuttle and the space station down.
Burt Rutan has not really shown that he has a better solution for getting living meat into orbit and brining it back down on a cost effective basis.
Burt Rutan's company will either run out of money or kill a few want to be astronauts or both. He may launch a very nice sub-orbital flight and crash his spaceship in the ocean, but there is at lease one thing on the following list things Burt Rutan's company is never going to do.
America has flown living meat in space on around 200 times and we have created 17 incinerated corpses to prove it.
All of the real science and technology of the space program comes from unmanned launches and the manned space program has never been anything but a high-flying white elephant heavily subsidized by the US Federal Government.
The USA has two working space shuttles, a partially complete and nearly useless space station, some Russian space partners we massively subsidize with our tax dollars, and very little to show for our efforts except some neat pictures from the seventy's some nifty moon rocks, and the national pride that comes with these very impressive accomplishments.
The USA needs a space program for the 21st century and not the 20th century.
The fact is that space is a really big cold dark place and not many humans are not going to be traveling very far into it anytime in the next few decades.
I wish Burt Rutan well, but as a man who has seen a Titan IV blow up on the pad up close enough to make my ears ring I can only repeat what Von Braun keep shouting at the NASA engineers 35 years ago, "Rocketry is not aviation". Burt Rutan's vehicle does not have the lift to put three people in orbit, and it does not have the protection to bring them down.