Going Suborbital

I have been looking at his market since my original work on the Southwest Regional Spaceport (now Spaceport America) in the early 1990's. This market, and not space tourism, has always been the low hanging fruit for sub-orbitals since the regulatory issues are much less, crew is optional, and you already have an established market for the service.

The reluctance of the sub-orbital research community to rush forward and line up for the new sub-orbital vehicles in not surprising. Experiments take time and effort to produce and are critical both for advancing careers and research agendas. The reluctance in 1946 was in seeing if the sounding rockets available would be reliable enough to actually work. Once they proved themselves researchers quickly adopted them for their work. The same will be true for the new generation of reusable sub-orbital vehicles (RSV), ONCE they are flying. But until then researchers will hold back and continue to use what works today.

As a side note VG threw away a great opportunity to develop this market in 2004 by not using the original Spaceshipone to develop it, or by building an additional Spaceshipone to test the waters. Its great the sub-orbitals are finally starting to explore this market.