While cutting time in the air by half may not make a fundamental difference, cutting it by five or six times could. Point-to-point sub-orbital services have the

While cutting time in the air by half may not make a fundamental difference, cutting it by five or six times could. Point-to-point sub-orbital services have the potential to do this, though there are challenges for this type of flight that bring its difficulties closer to orbital operations than the (mostly) straight up and down trajectories that will be flown by Virgin Galactic, XCOR, etc.