Our goal is to show that you can develop a robust, safe manned space program and do it at an extremely low cost.

I have a hunch the most important reason we're going to space is not known now.

When you have a transportation system that the price of propellant is essentially negligible something is very wrong. If you look at any other transportation system, a car, a motorcycle, a train, an oil tanker, an airliner, you name it; about a quarter to a third of the operating cost is buying the propellant.

Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.

I drove an electric car for seven years because of its advanced technology, not because I have any concerns about energy resources. I have none at all. And when environmentalists say that global warming is dangerous, unprecedented and that we'll have a tipping point for atmospheric carbon dioxide, it's just nonsense.

To allow public access to orbit, we would need breakthroughs that would lower the cost by a lot more than an order of magnitude and increase safety by a factor of 100 as compared to every launch system used since the first manned space flight. I think airborne launch will be a significant part of the safety solution.

The next 15 years will see thousands of people leave the atmosphere on suborbital flights. My company's SS2 system might fly 100,000 people by 2024. If it is shown to be highly profitable, perhaps we will see 20,000 people traveling to orbit by 2035, and then thousands to the moon by 2050. If we make a courageous decision, like the program we kicked off for Apollo, we will see our grandchildren in outposts on other planets.