Burt Rutan thinks that the operating cost of EADS’s proposal will be too high. I’m actually much more concerned (as is he) with the development costs. I’ve seen an estimate of a billion Euros. At 200,000 euros a ticket, you’ll have to sell about five thousand rides just to get back the non-recurring costs, and that doesn’t even include the cost of the money.

I think that the suborbital market makes sense, but not if you have to spend that much money up front. I think a smart entrepreneur could get to orbit for that amount (Elon has only spent a tenth of that amount, though he’s not returning). I just don’t think that a conventional player, like EADS (or Boeing, or Lockheed Martin) has either the cost structure or the risk acceptance to take on a program like this and make it successful. I suppose, though, it’s possible that they’re willing to take a bath on it if they expect it to give them a pre-cursor for a much larger point-to-point market, or military applications.

[Reading a few more articles]

Ah, they’re not committed to it. They’re just floating a trial balloon:

“We are offering a profitable system and have given ourselves until early 2008 to find industrial partners to share the risk, private investment of around