Red Room Where the Writers Are

All right, so I'm a geek.  Or perhaps a recovering geek.  I grew up on a steady diet of promises of cheap and ubiquitous space travel that never quite came true.  So when Sir Richard Branson and Burt Rutan announced they were teaming up to build spaceships, I sat up and took notice.  All right, so they'll only have ten percent of the energy required to achieve orbit, but it's a start, and it's more than NASA ever did to bring space travel to the masses. 

 The partnership has begun to bear fruit.  Behold:  http://www.virgingalactic.com/pressftp/

 It's a thing of beauty, in my opinion.  A technological as well as artistic triumph.  And about damned time. 

Will it be merely a plaything of the super-wealthy?  Well yes, of course, at least initially.  But then again, many technological revolutions started out in exactly the same manner, and then later, as the techgnology was perfected and economies of scale kicked in, it eventually became available to most people.  Things such as air travel, computers, ice cream, and hospitals.  And eventually, space travel.