The entry of EADS, the big European aerospace firm, in the “pay-per-view” suborbital space tourism sweepstakes is getting a bit of a skeptical eye from U.S. spaceplane designer, Burt Rutan.

Rutan and his Scaled Composites team are busy working on the passenger-toting SpaceShipTwo and its huge carrier/release plane, the WhiteKnight 2.

“Like other spaceship concepts that takeoff from a runway (XCOR and Rocketplane) or those that do rocket-powered vertical launches, the EADS vehicle will weigh more than twice as much (per passenger) as SpaceShipTwo and require more than twice the rocket impulse,” Rutan told me. “This relates to significant increases in operational costs,” he added, also noting that failure modes on ascent tend to be more risky at low altitudes.

“The non-recurring development cost of a suborbital spaceship that has rocket and jet engines — both of which leave the atmosphere and experience reentry — will be far more than our SpaceShipTwo program,” he said.

Meanwhile, my recent visit out to Rutan’s plant in Mojave, California was telling - lots of folks coming and going from the firm’s production site that also includes a substantial piece of outdoor composite fabricating equipment.

Scaled Composites has ramped up to over 250 employees, about twice the number of folks from just three years ago. A large number of those people are probably assigned to the Sir Richard Branson-sponsored suborbital space travel business under the Virgin Galactic flag.