Re: Rutan spaceplane

> This is generally not known until the program is complete, but
projections
> place it close to a Soyuz ride."

That's only because Soyuz are done in Russia.  If the Russian's had to
pay
the cost of American labor, then the Soyuz rides would cost much, much
more.
This is what is significant about Rutan's spaceplane.  It is the cost of
a
Soyuz ride, but is done in the U.S. with very expensive (in comparison
to
Russia) labor costs, but it doesn't cost anymore.

> Accounting can be quite a creative art, so everything about this must
be
> taken with a grain of salt..

Considering the accounting scandals in the past two years on both sides
of
the Atlantic, I would agree; however, Burt Rutan has very good
reputation,
and I doubt he would blow it over fake cost estimates.	Engineers tend
be
very unforgiving deciet.  It's one thing to be wrong, but to mislead is
surest way to ruin an engineering career for good.

> For the X-15, here's a page with a summary of its cost.
> http://www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/spacemarkets/sld008.htm
> It puts a single flight at 10 Million US$ at today's prices

Actually...
"If these figures are plugged into a spreadsheet, we note that the price
per
flight has to be set to at least $2.5 million in 1964 dollars to achieve
a
decent return on investment (=$10 million+ today). "
I would argue that prices have gone up considerably more then four fold
since 1964.  Also, testing in Areospace was much cheaper back then (read
as
much less stringent safety requirements, much less liability, etc.). 
The
X-15 also carried only a single person (if I remember correctly), 1/3
the
people of Spaceship One.

> The X-15 was reusable and had an average of 20 flights/year (max.32).

To win the X-Prize requires a two week turn around which implies (but
does
not neccessarily mean) 25 flights a year.  The info on the Scaled
Composite
web site implies that most of the down time is due to the rocket engine.
There is no reason why an improved engine of much lower maintence can't
be
developed, possibly an areospike engine.

> Certainly an impressive achievement. But Burt Rutan is a talent in a
class
> of his own.

And we are very lucky to have an engineer like him.

ias