One of the forums we caught was Burt Rutan's talk on the future of private spaceflight. As usual Burt is flying in clean air, with a thundering herd of "me too!" people trailing far behind in his wake.
I remember two things he talked about. The first was that the government has decided to operate commercial spaceflight on a "the passengers have signed a waver, so nobody really cares how well designed the spaceship is, as long as it doesn't hurt property and people downrange." Burt thinks this is dangerous, and that there should be some form of certification for commercial space ships.
The second thing, and much more exciting in a "wow, cool!" sort of vein is that federal regulations require that there be a pilot and copilot on board. Instead of taking the obvious route (and significantly reduce the amount of revenue paying customers on board), he's going to charge extra for customers to become type rated in the spaceship, and then the copilot will also be a paying passenger. This is totally brilliant. It will attract all sorts of rich pilots who may have originally not wanted to go if they were just going to be passengers . It creates a large pool of trained pilots for when he starts selling spaceships, and is just basically a brilliant marketing move in every way.
