[Colonol Dekker]

I saw it on the news this morning. Apparently it'll cost two hundred grand for six minutes flight, and could be in service as early as two thousand and eleven. . . . According to the beeb. I'm sure you can find it by Google

[Solatar]

I saw that on the BBC as well.  It looked very interesting.  Obviously much more expensive than the average person could afford, but $200,000 is a far cry from the huge price tag for a flight up with a shuttle crew.  Of course you only get 6 minutes of weightless floating, but hey, it's a bargain.

[Galemp]

It's about time.

[Liberator]

Would make more sense for them to offer it as a long distance rapid transit for the upper crust folk who need to continent hop to manage their fortunes.  That would push it main stream and allow for the development of larger vehicles.

[Kosh]

Hopefully the cost will be driven down overtime. Regular airtravel used to be prohibitively expensive for ordinary people until relatively recently.

One definate future application is using this type of technology to dramatically reduce international travel times.

[Black Wolf]

Would make more sense for them to offer it as a long distance rapid transit for the upper crust folk who need to continent hop to manage their fortunes.  That would push it main stream and allow for the development of larger vehicles.

No value in it, thanks to the Internet. The amount of infrastructure you'd need would be prertty serious - after all, the business world's massively diversified since the Concorde got going, and even that didn't survive the advent ofg cheap high speed intercontinental information transfer. For this you'd need (minimum) spaceports on the east and west coast of America, One in Europe, one in China and possibly future ones in India, Moscow and the Middle East. And even then you'd need to have a jet there to get you from the city you're in to the spaceport (wqhich'd likely be in the desert), then from the next spaceport to the city you need to be in - you might be saving a few hours, but you'd be spending hundreds of thousands to do it and changing planes not once, not even twice, but three times or more. I just don't see it.

[Kosh]

Would make more sense for them to offer it as a long distance rapid transit for the upper crust folk who need to continent hop to manage their fortunes.  That would push it main stream and allow for the development of larger vehicles.

No value in it, thanks to the Internet. The amount of infrastructure you'd need would be prertty serious - after all, the business world's massively diversified since the Concorde got going, and even that didn't survive the advent ofg cheap high speed intercontinental information transfer. For this you'd need (minimum) spaceports on the east and west coast of America, One in Europe, one in China and possibly future ones in India, Moscow and the Middle East. And even then you'd need to have a jet there to get you from the city you're in to the spaceport (wqhich'd likely be in the desert), then from the next spaceport to the city you need to be in - you might be saving a few hours, but you'd be spending hundreds of thousands to do it and changing planes not once, not even twice, but three times or more. I just don't see it.

International business trips are still a common occurence, and speaking from personal experience 13+ hour flights are not fun.

[Black Wolf]

International business trips are still a common occurence, and speaking from personal experience 13+ hour flights are not fun.

Yeah, they're common, but they're not going to be replaced by something that's vastly more expensive for only a relatively short amount of time saved.

[watsisname]

Got to agree with Black Wolf here, it's just not cost effective to use suborbital flight merely to traffic people around.  Though it would be a nice ride. 

With 6 minutes of weightlessness, I wonder how far the flight actually takes you.  Guess it depends on how far this thing glides on reentry, but I'm guessing a good few thousand miles. 

Oh hey, here's their wobsite:  http://www.virgingalactic.com/

[Kosh]

International business trips are still a common occurence, and speaking from personal experience 13+ hour flights are not fun.

Yeah, they're common, but they're not going to be replaced by something that's vastly more expensive for only a relatively short amount of time saved.

Short amount of time? Theoretically you could go across the pacific from the US to China in just a couple of hours. Compare that with what we have now that takes 13-15 hours. I would call 11-13 hour time savings to be pretty significant. Plus, there is also the potential for prices to go down.

[Black Wolf]

The time saved in crossing the ocean in the spaceship would be eaten into by the ime it'd take to get from your destination (say,  New York) to New Mexico, and then from wherever China's theoretical spaceport might be (presumablythe south of the country, although near-equatorial launches might not be neccesaryfor spaceplanes the way they are for rockets) to where you want to go. Not to mention the inonvenience of changing planes twice or more. It'd all add up - even conservatively, giving yourself say, an hour and a half in the air for each sub trip, half an hour to board each plane and get takeoff clearance, you're looking at a 6 or 7 hour trip. Time's saved for sure, but is it enough to justify the presumably massive price tag for the individual flights and the facilitys to launch these vessels? (The new mexico one is costing 200 illion) I just don't see there being enough of a market for it, even if you're dual using facilities for tourism and travel.

20 or 30 years down the road, maybe we'll see it s cheap enough to justify, very similar  to the way early aviation went from enthusiasts to the rich to the general public over a few decades, but not now, and not with this ship.

[Mongoose]

SpaceShip Two certainly isn't designed to serve as any sort of regular commuter service, but that doesn't mean that such designs don't already exist.  There's been a lot of talk in the past about the concept of something like a suborbital jetliner, a craft that can take off from a normal runway, achieve suborbital flight, and land again on another normal runway.  At least as far as I'm aware, there's not a whole lot keeping us from building something like that right now, besides the non-cost-effectiveness and the issues with getting everything to mesh properly.

[Nuke]

space ship two is pretty much designed only to travel about 100 km, all be it straight up. what you need is an aurora type scramjet powered hypersonic aircraft. assuming ss2 is still using hybrid rocket engines (i dont see why not after spending so much money developing them). hybrid engines are essentially a safer alternative to solid rocket boosters, in that oxidizer flow may be cut off to stop combustion of solid fuel (though im not sure if they are re-ignitable). even the mythbusters managed to build one. nasa doesnt seem to want to touch hybrid rocket engines for some reason.

scram is really the only way to go for a hypersonic airliner, it can operate in very thin air, it can breathe air so no oxidizer needs to be kept onboard and they operate to a maximum theoretical speed of mach 7. scamjets do actually have to be brought up to altitude and about mach 3 to power up though. so it would either require dual propulsion or a carrier aircraft capable of reaching the minimum ignition requirements (were talking sr-71 type performance).

[Janos]

SpaceShip Two certainly isn't designed to serve as any sort of regular commuter service, but that doesn't mean that such designs don't already exist.  There's been a lot of talk in the past about the concept of something like a suborbital jetliner, a craft that can take off from a normal runway, achieve suborbital flight, and land again on another normal runway.  At least as far as I'm aware, there's not a whole lot keeping us from building something like that right now, besides the non-cost-effectiveness and the issues with getting everything to mesh properly.

Concept is a concept. Practical applications are a different thing.

Cost-effectiveness and ability to actually build something are also quite important here on Earth.

[Colonol Dekker]

Cost affectiveness and time efficiency < bragging rights and exclusivity

[Scotty]

bragging rights and exclusivity ----> cost effectiveness and time efficiency.

[Colonol Dekker]

Didn't I just say that albeit backwards
 
If I had a few million, i'd happily lose a chunk to go orbital without having to pass cosmonaut or astronaut basic training. 

[Scotty]

Well, I meant "leads to," because eventually people will want to stop wasting exorbitant amounts of money when they can do it for cheaper.

[Mongoose]

SpaceShip Two certainly isn't designed to serve as any sort of regular commuter service, but that doesn't mean that such designs don't already exist.  There's been a lot of talk in the past about the concept of something like a suborbital jetliner, a craft that can take off from a normal runway, achieve suborbital flight, and land again on another normal runway.  At least as far as I'm aware, there's not a whole lot keeping us from building something like that right now, besides the non-cost-effectiveness and the issues with getting everything to mesh properly.

Concept is a concept. Practical applications are a different thing.

Cost-effectiveness and ability to actually build something are also quite important here on Earth.

Obviously, but if you get a good proof-of-concept working and then give it twenty or thirty years of refinement and cost-cutting, you'll likely wind up with something that's pretty damn feasible in the end.

[Aardwolf]

Awesome. But $200,000 is a bit more than I can afford

Although... If they can make more than just the prototype, I wouldn't be surprised if the costs went down significantly.