<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>It would also fly higher, and further down range.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>This certainly translates as "And we're including a fly-by-wire, computer controlled trajectory navigation unit."<br /><br />I'm not denegrading the heroic efforts of Mike, Brian, and ...Peter?(dang, who was that third pilot? He developed the simulator and the flight controls...) but one thing the telemetry shows pretty clearly is that small initial errors yield greatly divergent recovery trajectories.<br /><br />SS2 will certainly be robust enough to fly around any situation they find themselves in, but a craft with a greater down range capability is going to require very significant, delicate inputs at the front end. If you're flying a thousand miles in a few minutes, and you enter your ballistic trajectory a couple degrees off, you'll be clearing traffic from a non-spaceport rated landing field (a hundred miles from your planned destination) in the best case (and picking up debris in the worst case).