Commercial Space Travel in 2006?

Image:Altairis Rocket (cgi); Spirit of Liberty 2 (cgi)
Info: American Astronautics (w/pics); AERA Corp. details

They were American Astronautics when they were competing for the Ansari X-Prize, now they are AERA Corp. They still haven't shown anyone a single piece of actual hardware (first named Spirit of Liberty, now renamed Altairis) but today they announced tickets are on-sale ($250,000 each) for a December 2006 commercial Space tourism launch. Here's a snippet from the SpaceDaily.com story:


Altairis will lift off from Cape Canaveral beginning in December 2006. Tickets go on sale this morning.
"With our design completed and our agreements in place to use Cape Canaveral for launch, flight logistics and landing, we are now ready to begin ticket sales," said Bill Sprague, founder, president and chief scientist behind the Altairis Rocket.
Altairis is designed to comfortably launch six passenger astronauts and one mission commander into space and bring them safely back to earth.




Supposedly, it's a seven passenger Spacecraft capable of vertical take-off and landing, but no one has seen it yet. In fact, it may not exist anywhere but on paper.
Unfortunately, announcements such as this one often cause disappointment when it's discovered there is no funding and no actual craft, just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. Let's think about this for a moment: How can they go from never having tested the craft or making a single attempt at the X-prize, to successfully launching a seven-passenger craft in less than 18-months? On their site is a cool animated video of what their ship can do, but anyone can make an animated video these days. Why should we get excited about that?
Personally, I don't think they will come anywhere close to an actual launch; they just want to siphon some potential Space tourist dollars from Virgin Galactic.
I hope I'm wrong, but the odds are this bird will never fly.
Though if it does, I'll be the first one to tell you about it!