Agreed. Let’s say if I earned $200K/yr, and was close to “retirement”. I’d consider working an extra year to take a 90 min orbit in space. I would not make that same decision for a 3 min joy ride.
The earlier you do it, the longer you can live life sharing your experience and viewing everything through its perspective, instead of just fly and die maybe a decade later or so.
I'm guessing that would be that the second stage provides retropulsion to get you back to nominal zero velocity over the return point.
So that would be launch, booster returns to the pad, and the second stage pushes you up enough to insure an orbit, then your orient for return. Enjoy the view etc, and then the second stage relights to cancel your velocity to 0 as you arrive over the launch facility (you'll have to scoot 1000 miles or so east as well given planetary rotation) and then separate for a parachute landing of perhaps both the capsule and the second stage booster.
Sounds pretty complex. But you would have to recover all equipment if you wanted to have a chance as meeting the economics of that.
That is not feasible. Your second stage would have to be roughly as large as an entire orbital rocket in order to slow itself down from orbital speeds to zero, which means your first stage would have to be massive in order to push the second stage into orbit.
The reason every vehicle that re-enters the atmosphere uses a heat shield is because it's way easier to carry a relatively light heat shield that sheds off the speed than to carry the massive amount of fuel to shed off the same speed.
It's horizontal velocity (actual LEO velocity) that causes the heating effects a Soyuz or Dragon type capsule needs to survive with heat shield on re-entry.
All equipment, and especially the people in the equipment. One "safety incident" would crash the whole operation.
Depends on the industry in which you earn your salary. Some are not above the board.