Doug Messier is pretty sceptical about the role of Richard Branson's over optimistic pronouncements and marketing of the enterprise throughout the programme to date but I think he is fair in his comments and is well informed generally...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipTwo
. - See more at:http://www.parabolicarc.com/2015/11/16/shock-tears-spin-aftermath-spaceshiptwo-crash/#sthash.zmayCwNd.dpufIn his autobiography, Chuck Yeager dismissed Tom Wolfe’s “right stuff” as a meaningless phrase for describing a pilot’s attributes. Good pilots are not born, they are made. Yeager attributed his success to a combination of natural abilities (good coordination, excellent eyesight, intuitive understanding of machinery, coolness under pressure) and good old-fashioned hard work. He worked his tail off learning how to fly, learned everything he could about the aircraft he flew, and spent more time flying them than anyone else. Yeager also mentioned another factor: luck. He was born at the right time, and found himself in the right places to make a career out of flying. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he always managed to find his way out of tight spots through a combination of skill and luck. “The secret to my success was that I somehow always managed to fly another day,” Yeager wrote. “To be remembered for accomplishing significant things, a test pilot has to survive. Hell, I could have busted my ass a dozen times over and nobody would have heard of me. I would have been Yeager Boulevard carrying military housewives to the commissary at Edwards.” On the morning of Oct. 31, 2014, Mike Alsbury’s luck ran out in the sky near Koehn Lake. Piloting SpaceShipTwo in powered flight for the first time in 18 months, he made a mistake from which he could not recover. The ship broke up, and he plummeted to Earth still strapped into his seat. His friend Pete Siebold was extremely lucky. He was thrown free of SpaceShipTwo as it disintegrated around him. When he regained consciousness in the thin air, he had the presence of mind to release himself from his seat so the parachute could deploy later. The chute was undamaged by the breakup and saved his life
from Part 5 of the series
Caco