Clark Lindsey has a summary of the Av Week article.

Mr. Lindsey says that he lost his bet that SS1 would make the cover of Aviation Week. Aviation Week's cover is a rather dull commercial airliner shot. I agree that SS1 would have been a better cover. On June 2 Mr. Lindsey predicted that the number of people in attendance to watch the flight would be "a low of a few tens of thousands to a high of a few hundred thousand." Aviation Week says the number was 27,000.

Hope the issues with asymmetrical nozzle velocities doesn't become a show stopper. Issues with engine design could potentially delay things quite a bit I would think.

I was a bit disappointed at the 11k number mentioned last week. Glad to hear one estimate is up to 27k. If the flight had been on a weekend rather than a Monday I bet (maybe I should stop that) it would have been considerably bigger.

Alan Boyle was told by Diamandis that for the X PRIZE launch, they "will offer even more for spectators than this week's Mojave launch, including giant Diamondvision displays at the site and a global webcast on the Internet."

With two months of buildup maybe the number will exceed a 100k. Seems feasible.

Good. I think that was a test flight in more ways than one. The reporting could have been much better, but Scaled could have prepared them better, and had more too.

I got a laugh out of the NPR estimate "Hundreds of people gathered in the Mojave Desert Monday morning ..." from

http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_1967635.html

Much like saying there are hundreds of seconds in a day.

It was awesome. What more can I say? I am so frustrated by the the large number of people that are unaware -- and that quite frankly I don't think the aerospace industry has quite grasped the potential that has been shown to be possible.

http://www.humanhighway.net/gallery/MojaveSpaceport

Mojave Spaceport, Oct 4th