Spaceship one

[GeorgeF]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/ss1/040929x1launch.html

Rutan agreed, saying he believed "the aerospace primes" - Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other major contractors - "will be building low-cost human carrying spaceships, they just don't know that yet."

"I think it's very, very similar to IBM in 1975 before Jobs and Wozniak went to work," Rutan said. "IBM didn't know that they'd be building $700 computers. But they did, they had to. And I think we are likely going to see the same thing happen with rocketry."

Current Delta, Atlas and Titan rockets build by Boeing and Lockheed Martin are similar, Rutan said, to "those big old dinosaur mainframes that IBM was making a few of and saying there's not much market here and why would a person want a computer? I really think that that is going to happen with striking parallel."

I wonder which companies will be the aerospace version of "Digital Eqipment Corp". It might be easier to figure out the losers than the winners. It seems to me that some of the big rocket and aerospace manufacturers are going out of business. In particular business jets are in trouble; why spend 12 hrs in a fancy jet when you can spend 20 min in a rocket plane.