They are still in their flight test program. This program is what will tell them the actual (as opposed to the predicted) performance of all of their systems. It’s important that the weather is good, so they don’t need to worry about unpredictable winds – and more importantly, so they can see the spacecraft from the ground and the chase plane. If something goes wrong, they want to be able to see what happened so they have some chance at fixing it.

They’ve already had a lot of test flights – just not into space yet.

Personally, I prefer them taking extra time to work out all the kinks to flying prematurely and courting a disaster that could set suborbital tourism back a few years.

Disclaimer: I work for XCOR, a VG competitor. We would benefit from VG delays and suffer from a VG disaster.

And no test flight till 2014. This so so frustrating.