I've known about this deal for a while, but this is the first story I've seen that includes an artist's concept of the vehicle. It's a pretty bird. There are some more pics at the XCOR site.

Basically, the story is that XCOR and Space Adventures have teamed up to raise funds to develop a suborbital passenger vehicle.

It is a pretty bird, but I can't see why the've only put 1 passenger seat in. Not only are they illegible for the X-prize (if thye fly it in time), but they will get less money for each flight.

This isn't NASA and thus they aren't trying to make the grossly move of doing research and prototyping a production vehicle simultaneously. The EZ-Rocket serves as proof of concept and test bed for their work in low cost applications of rocketry. Given capital investment they would then proceed to scale up the technology into something that would drive a commercial application.

In the interim there is hope that the single seater can be FAA approved and sold into the wealthy hobbyist market where there is nothing else like it.

Low end and peripheral markets can be a useful source of income while developing big projects. The people who developed the original Amiga chipset started the company around a line of video game controllers to create a revenue stream until they had something impressive enough to draw investors.

I get it. SO the EZ-rocket is there DC-X (cheap demonstrator), the Xerus is their DC-Y (flies the mission profile of the production vehicle without carrying payload), and to come is a DC-1 (actual prouction plane, fully certified, etc), The Xerus would ideally fly just as a prototype, but the've stuck in a passenger seat to attract investors