Jeff Foust reports on Burt Rutan's presentation at the annual symposium of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots last week in LA. Worth a read if you want to get the latest scoop on SpaceShipOne. He saves the most intriguing bit for last:

The final slide of the presentation, put on the screen during a brief question-and-answer session, showed what appeared to be a scaled-up version of the SS1 (see photo). A cutaway showed the cabin, with one pilot and ten passengers (arranged in three rows of three people with the tenth person floating above them.) The illustration was simply captioned ?A Future Space Tourism Ride??

Just a heads up for anyone speculating about launch dates. While first private suborbital could theorethically fly any day now ( regulatory environment permitting, which is doesnt in US, AFAIK ), as of date of this writing, the X-Prize launch attempt cannot be made before October, 30th, because of the following rule in X-prize rulebook:

"6. Entrants must specify and provide the X PRIZE Rules Committee with their take-off and landing location, and the date of their launch, not less than 30 days prior to any flight attempt."

So, to meet the deadline of december, 17th, Rutan would have to announce the attempt on november, 17th at the latest.

Hm. Which, btw means that Chinese will most likely be the next ones launching people to space. Tentative launch date for Shenzhou-5 is speculated between Oct. 11 and 17.
Report here:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/china-03zb.html

of course, Rutan's first launch does not have to be an X-prize attempt. After the sucessfull launch, he could announce the dates of the 2 qualifying launches. this way he would avoid the bad publicity of a failed attempt. With a sucessful launch, he may get better press coverage for the 2 X-prize launches, and may have a passenger for the flight.

Right, and in fact, I doubt if his first launch will be an X-Prize attempt, at least if he also wants to do it in December, because he won't be able to get a launch license in time.

Will the flight schedules be made public? Maybe someone could have scheduled a flight and the info is just being kept confidential for some reason?

Other than discouraging espionage and terrorism, I see no viable reason to withhold flight schedules in relation to an attempt for the X-Prize. Individual companies' test flights can (and, in my opinion, should) be kept confidential before-the-fact, as they are merely test flights. There is no need to generate much fanfare unless they accomplish some sort of breakthrough, at which point you publish such results after the fact.

To withhold scheduled X-Prize attempts gives the company holding the flight an unfair advantage, in my opinion, inasmuch as any other companies that are "close" have a 1-month disadvantage if they don't find out about the flight until the day of. And, considering most X-Prize attempts will be made after a successful test (one would hope), it would be pointless in a PR sense to withhold the information, especially if you're the first to go for it. I'd personally like to have a chance to get to the launch/landing site, if allowed and if possible, and I'm sure many others, journalists and enthusiasts included, would want to do the same.

In any case, I don't see any point for withholding X-Prize attempt schedules, and I think that it would be in the best interest of the "industry" to make the first attempts as public as possible.