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Comment by carbocation | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the physics or the finances aren't there, but I would imagine that an excellent use for sub-orbital near-spaceflight would be to get between two distant cities (Tokyo and London) extremely quickly. Virgin Galactic would seem to be poised to execute on this, if there is a market for it.

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The physics aren't bad; the fuel requirements for the same payload for point to point suborbital travel are about the same as a full tank for a 747 from Sydney to Istanbul. You spend a lot of energy getting up to speed, but you have much less drag.

The challenge is making it safe enough / rapidly reusable enough. If you're at just suborbital speeds, the temperature from the adiabatic compression on reentry is intense, and it's a technical challenge to handle the heating either non-ablatively, or ablatively but with cheap, safe rapidly re-applicable ablative material.

I'm signed up for Virgin Galactic and have talked to Richard Branson about this. While they haven't been very public about it, they are absolutely focused on this use case and others beyond space tourism.

That's awesome, any hint on what kind of price range that might entail. I'm just wondering if it will only be available to the super-rich or if it's something a middle class person could splurge on. For instance, I'd easily pay 5x for a near space flight to Switzerland from SFO that got me there 3 times faster (so say $5000 USD instead of $1000 USD) but I couldn't imagine paying space tourism type prices.

This is one of the end uses of suborbital flights: New York to Beijing in 3 hours. The cost is high, but there are people who would pay a lot of money to make that trip in that short a time.

I wonder how the in-flight wifi would/could be. The sort of customer you are talking about is probably rather accustomed to being constantly connected.

I highly doubt that 13 hours of wifi-connected travel is preferable to 3 hours offline. With a 3-hour suborbital flight you can fly out to Beijing to finalize a deal and be back in time for a late dinner.

If you fly out with your lawyers and team, you could spend the 3 hours prepping, and the 3 hours back drinking the celebratory champagne.

Assuming you could determine the flight schedule personally, which you probably can't.

Considering that the first ship had 6 spaces advertised, you might be able to determine the schedule by book all the spots.

Hmm, champagne. I wonder what the characteristics of such a ride would be. After the initial 2-3 minute burn I imagine they would spend most of their time in free-fall right? Maybe they could serve champagne in those "capri sun" bags: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capri_Sun_Apple_1.jpg

How would it work? The 100 km space hops are puny compared to the 11,000 km distance between Beijing and New York.

ICBM:s do it by flying trajectories with multi thousand kilometer apogees, crossing radiation belts etc. It's cheaper that way than going into a shallow high speed trajectory which requires almost orbital speeds and higher energies. (Even this wasn't obvious before ICBM:s - they worked on atmospheric cruise missiles like Navajo in parallel.)

So, point to point does not look very synergistic with these suborbital technologies. New York to Europe is around 6000 km, still a factor of 60. Transatlantic point to point is far closer to orbital flights really than these space hops.

That route would make a lot of sense since both London and Tokyo are major financial centers.

Tokyo - Frankfurt would be great as well since (a) Germany and Japan have a lot of ties in their manufacturing industries (ex: autos) and (b) since Frankfurt is the international air-travel hub of Europe.

Both Hong Kong and Singapore are larger financial centers than Tokyo. I agree about Frankfurt -- in Europe, Geneva, Zurich, and Frankfurt are all about the same size.

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