During the Q&A session of his ISDC speech Thursday, Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn was asked about thoughts about XCOR Aerospace, who announced plans for its own suborbital vehicle, Lynx, in March:

XCOR is a company I respect, but with respect to them, they’re not building a spaceship. They’re building basically a high-altitude MiG equivalent. They’re building something that you can strap in and go up to 37 miles. You won’t get your astronaut wings but you will see the curvature of the earth. That will be an exciting project, but the problem is that it’s not a space project, and I think it’s been a little bit wrong to call it that.

Whitehorn added that Virgin’s customers are paying $200,000 for a complete experience that includes floating around the cabin and flying beyond the 100-kilometer boundary of space, something that the Mark 1 version of Lynx won’t be able to offer.

Whitehorn did say that XCOR is a “clever” company that is able to build Lynx, and “if the price of it was cheap enough, it’s the kind of thing we would buy.” He added, though, that XCOR’s $100,000 initial ticket price was not cheap enough. “I would say to XCOR to keep on doing what you’re doing, but you’ll have to get the price of that well, well down relative to the SpaceShipTwo launch price for it to work successfully.”

The Personal Spaceflight Federation issued a press release yesterday about a new study with some financial metrics about the personal spaceflight industry. The numbers are surprisingly large: the study found that the industry generated $268 million in revenue in 2007, up from $165 million in 2006, with $1.2 billion in total investment to date as well as 1,227 employees of various firms.

All the release says that the revenue numbers include three categories: “personal spaceflight services; personal spaceflight-related hardware sales, hardware development, and support services; and, non-personal spaceflight revenue of personal spaceflight organizations”. More details will (presumably) be released when the study is presented Saturday at the ISDC; I suspect that much of the revenue comes from that last category, particularly for PSF members like Scaled Composites and SpaceX, which have significant business activity not directly related to personal spaceflight.

White Knight 2 (WK2), the carrier aircraft under development by Scaled Composites for Virgin Galactic, will be rolled out on July 28, Virgin’s Will Whitehorn announced Thursday morning at the International Space Development Conference in Washington, DC. He didn’t announced the location of the rollout, but presumably it will be in Mojave, as he said test flights of the aircraft would not begin until August or September. (Interestingly, it is the day before Burt Rutan and Sir Richard Branson are scheduled to appear at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh “with SpaceShipTwo”.) This date had been predicted for a few weeks, such as by Rob Coppinger at Flightglobal.com.

Whitehorn, interestingly, was playing up the alternative uses of WK2 in his talk, noting that, in addition to launching SpaceShipTwo, it could be used for air-launching rockets for putting small satellites into orbit, for science, even for cargo and as a “water bomber” for fighting forest fires. He described these applications in part as a “fallback” should SS2 fall through in some way.

He added that, as noted by Flightglobal.com earlier this month, Virgin had considered flying a version of SS1 first (which he dubbed “SpaceShipOne B”). However, they rejected the idea because SS1B would be too small to allow people to float around the cabin, and that was something their customers were very much interested in. Moreover, he said, there would be few other applications for an SS1B besides tourism. That desire for weightlessness forced them into designing a larger vehicle that could accommodate customers’ desires for weightlessness as well as support additional applications.

Whitehorn had little to say about the status of the SS2 propulsion program in the wake of the accident last summer that killed three Scaled employees. He said there had been “lessons learnt” from the accident and that they were moving ahead, but offered nothing more specific.

Check out RLV and Space Transport News for additional notes about Whitehorn’s talk as well as other ISDC presentations.