well the aircraft may look ordinary but it is not. Virgin Galactic is using the VMS eve aircraft designed by Scaled Composites a company known for unconventional designs and for its use of non-metal composite materials. The aircraft already been through 17 test flights from December 22 2008 till July 31 2009 reaching a maximum altitute of 52400 feet and max speed 370 KTAS. From that altitute spaceships are released from the mothership(VMS Eve) and climb over to 360000 feet and with 3 times the speed of sound this will only take 90 seconds. Now for the re-entry proccess while in space the wings fold up to provide a shuttle-cock or "feather" effect giving the spaceship extremely high drag.This allows the reentry deceleration to occur at a higher altitude and greatly reduces the forces and heating on the structure.Also the ship in the feathered configuration, will align itself automatically such that the pilot has a less critical flight control task. here you can see the mothership with and without the spaceship attached http://quarterbloom.com/blog1/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/virgin-galactic-vms-eve-maiden-flight-oshkosh-01-570x391.jpg http://www.techible.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/virgin_galactic_spaceshiptwo2.jpg

The temperature comes in from the velocity, the space shuttle comes in at mach ten or more I believe (its worth looking up), whereas I can see from the other answer here its looking only at a mach 3 entry, if not significantly less (bearing in mind that this reaches 0 velocity at the top of its flight for a minute or so before slowly dropping back down to earth, whereas the space shuttle is 'thrown' down to earth)