Virgin's Spaceship Two Re-entry: Cool Video

The physics and all behind this are quite amazing.  Very cool.

I was watching a story on satellite just the other night about this guy and what he did (I know it's not the same thing, but still fascinating, and quite ground-breaking for its time) -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kittinger

I won't even tell you what came to mind just by reading the title of the thread.

I've been fascinated by commercial space flight or even high altitude commercial passenger flight.  The engineering that goes into managing the external conditions is interesting to me.

Neat. Now that's "Falling with Style".

Kinda reminds me of suspending a ping-pong ball using the stream of air from a hair dryer. It looks unstable, but it somehow works....

That is amazing. I have not looked into it to much, and did not have sound on my work computer to hear what was said in the video, but it looks like doing that, they might be able to regulate re-entry speed enough that they wont need a full heat shield? I know that was always a big problem for the space program with the ceramic tile shields but if they can avoid that it would be great.

Not only that but it looks much more controlled. I wonder if they have plans to scale up the shuttle size/capacity for longer term trips or Lunar runs.

Can't wait to see what happens with this all ten years from now!