Hey, this is cool!

With NASA grounded after the shuttle thing, this news is very interesting:

A private manned spaceflight program was unveiled Friday at a desert airport where it has been in secret development by famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan for two years.

A rocket plane, dubbed SpaceShipOne, and the White Knight, an exotic jet designed to carry it aloft for a high-altitude air launch, were shown off in a hangar at Mojave Airport, where Rutan developed Voyager, the airplane that made the first nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world in 1986.

The stubby-winged SpaceShipOne, built by Rutan's Scaled Composites LLC, is designed to carry three people on a suborbital flight to an altitude of 62.5 miles. Rutan set no date for the first attempt, which will come after captive-carry flights and drop tests.

As a big sci-fi and space program fan, I'm always interested in news that looks like progress on that front