He may have written a dumber article in the past than this one, on how unsafe rocket planes will be, but I can’t recall it. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but in what I’ve read so far, almost every single sentence in it is wrong. I almost have to fisk it line by line, but I don’t have the time right now.

I’ll note, though, that attempting to extrapolate the safety record of 1960s research aircraft to twenty-first century operational tourism vehicles is…nutty.

The whole purpose of those programs was to learn how such vehicles operated, and about supersonic flight and spaceflight in general. We have much more knowledge now than we did then, and much better materials. The new aircraft will have much better margins. More importantly, it was a research program. Of course there were crashes–they were pushing the envelope. Tourist vehicles will be designed and operated with an entirely different philosophy.

When he notes that the X-15 broke in an aborted landing when it couldn’t do a full fuel dump, he seems to assume that the designers of modern spaceplanes are stupid, and that that their structure won’t be designed to handle fueled landing loads. His comment about the safety of SS1 verges on libelous, and his speculation that it wasn’t flown again for safety reasons is just that. SS1 was designed for one thing, and one thing only–to win the X-Prize. It was never intended to be a commercial operational vehicle.

When he claims that rocket planes will cost more to test than airliners, he provides zero data to support such a claim. When he writes:

The fatal crash rate will be at least 1-in-200 and probably more like 1-in-50.

…this is a number pulled out of his own exhaust nozzle.

I’ll leave the rest to the commenters, for now.