[RadioAstronomer]

Spiff, Excuse me for asking, but how much experience do you have in manned spaceflight or aerospace? Me I was in for 15 years - for calibration.

27 years and counting for me so far. Design and flight operations.

I have seen personally what gold plated requirements do to program cost and schedule. Yeah, its early days for Rutan. He also has a proven track record of getting a lot done for minimal money. We need much more like that and a lot less like what I saw when I worked on NASA and DOD spaceflight/satellite programs.

Rutan was able to use data from both the Air Force and NASA that cost billions of dollars and many years to produce.

[RKV]

Never said that the state of the art wasn't improved by all the big science money that was thrown at it. When I first started working on CADCAM in 1981 it took the equivalent of a mid-frame computer to run and we now do it with a pc. That said, do we need to pay all over again to get into earth orbit? I hope not. Rutan will be able to get into orbit in 2-3 years I bet. Can NASA replace the aging shuttle in that timeframe? No. Can we get to L4, L5 or to the moon with pretty much the same technology as will get Rutan into orbit? Yes. Can't STAY there for very long and that's what does in a manned Mars mission now (given what lack of gravity does to human health). And yep, space science gets done unmanned and with comparatively little funding doesn't it?