Virgin Galactic spaceship

Two articles about the Virgin spaceship (photos), the first by Raquel Maria Dillon in Time:

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo made its first powered flight recently, breaking the sound barrier in a test over the Mojave Desert that moves the company closer to its goal of flying paying passengers on brief hops into space.
“It couldn’t have gone more smoothly,” said Sir Richard Branson, who owns the spaceline with Aabar Investments PJC of Abu Dhabi. A special twin-fuselage jet carrying SpaceShipTwo took off at about 7:00 am PDT, spent 45 minutes climbing to an altitude of 48,000 feet and released the spaceship. Pilot Mark Stucky and co-pilot Mike Alsbury then triggered SpaceShipTwo’s rocket engine. The engine burned for sixteen seconds, propelling the spaceship to an altitude of 55,000 feet and a velocity of Mach 1.2, surpassing the speed of sound. SpaceShipTwo then glided to a safe landing at Mojave Air and Space Port in the desert north of Los Angeles, said George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s CEO.
The ten-minute test flight was considered a major step for the program. “Having spaceship and rocket perform together in the air is a long way toward getting into space,” said Branson, who watched from the ground. “A few more test flights with slightly bigger burns every time, and then we’ll all be back here to watch it go into space.”
Until this flight, SpaceShipTwo had only performed unpowered glide flights. Several powered flights are planned this summer, culminating with a dash into space toward the end of the year. SpaceShipTwo is a prototype commercial version of SpaceShipOne, which, in 2004, became the first privately developed manned rocket to reach space. Since the historic flight, more than five hundred aspiring space tourists have paid $200,000, or plunked down deposits, patiently waiting for a chance to float in weightlessness and view the Earth’s curvature from 62 miles up.
Branson initially predicted commercial flights would begin in 2007, but a deadly explosion during ground testing and longer-than-expected test flights pushed the deadline back. No date has been set for the first commercial flight from a custom-designed spaceport in New Mexico, but Virgin Galactic executives have said it will come after testing is complete and it secures approval from the government. Branson previously said the maiden passenger flight will carry his family.
SpaceShipTwo was built by Mojave-based aerospace research company Scaled Composites LLC, which was founded by cutting-edge aviation designer Burt Rutan. His SpaceShipOne, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, made three suborbital flights into space, reaching altitudes of 62 miles (a hundred kilometers) or greater, and won the ten million dollar Ansari X Prize.

and the second by Phil Plait in Slate: 

Humanity took another small step forward yesterday: Virgin Galactic performed a successful powered test flight of its space plane, SpaceShipTwo (or SS2).
The rocketplane was lofted to a height of 14,600 meters (48,000 feet) by its mothership (White Knight Two), released, and then the rocket motor kicked in. The rocketplane then went to an altitude of about 17,000 meters (56,000 feet), breaking the speed of sound to achieve a velocity of Mach 1.22. The flight lasted thirteen minutes, with SS2 gliding back to the spaceport in New Mexico from where it was launched. This was a critical test, the first powered flight using the rocket motor, and it apparently went quite well.
Virgin Galactic plans on taking paying customers to space using SS2 (and four other rocketplanes based on it built by the same company, Scaled Composites). Like this test flight, they’ll be carried aloft by a plane, released, and then launched into a ballistic parabola, reaching a height of over a hundred kilometers— by definition, the boundary of space. The spaceplane will then arc back down, and when it’s low enough it will simply glide back to the spaceport.
Here's a short video with some footage of the flight, and a promo by Sir Richard Branson:

Like what you saw? Wanna take a ride? Tickets are $200,000 each, so there you go. Still, Virgin Galactic has sold a lot of seats, including several to researchers. A hundred kilometers is high enough, and three to four minutes of weightlessness long enough, to get some good science done. And it’s a lot cheaper than a standard rocket flight.
I’ve heard some grumbling about this, mostly from people who think it’s just a toy for the rich. I don’t see that. First, as I pointed out, there is good science to be done here. Second, everything starts off expensive; the first passenger airplanes cost a fortune and tickets weren’t cheap. Eventually, as tech gets better and flights more routine, prices drop. Certainly there is a minimum cost to a flight like this, and it’ll be dear, but it will be within reach of a lot of people.
And remember, we’re just starting out here. Eventually, this tech can lead to better rockets, easier access to space, and other benefits we don’t see just yet. That’s usually the case when it comes to space exploration.
There isn’t enough money in the world to strap me into one of those planes— I get sick on a kid’s swing set— but I am a hundred percent behind this sort of thing. Let Virgin, let SpaceX, let Orbital, let Sierra Nevada, and let all the others blaze this trail to space. Humans may have evolved on this planet, but that doesn’t mean we have to stick around here forever.

Rico says he won't be saving his nickels for this ride, either; he won't even get on a swing set...