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Current space-hops just can't be anything more than a tourist attraction. Looking at the design it seems the ship is unable to do atmospheric entry from orbit a

• jccooper 13y ago
  There's plenty of research to be done in a suborbital flight regime, both standard sounding rocket stuff and new types that can benefit from either more room onboard or even from a human operator, or simply enabled by lower costs and greater availability and/or frequency. Lots of it may be testing things out destined for eventual orbital use. In a suborbital flight you can get many minutes of freefall, which beats the seconds available on parabolic flights (which are used for lots of the same experiments now.) NASA has a whole program for collecting experiments for suborbital flights, and Masten in particular is focused on research uses. I shouldn't be surprised if they fly a lot of potential orbital-flight candidates on suborbital just to get them used to freefall. Suborbital may not be a good as orbital, but it's much much cheaper, and cheapness has a quality all its own.
• HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago
  At a worldwide market size of $1.4 trillion (http://www.ibisworld.com/industry/global/global-tourism.html http://www.ibisworld.com/industry/global/global-tourism.html), "just a tourist attraction" is not a bad place to be at all.
  • moocowduckquack 13y ago
    If the Skylon manages to get built to spec and gets ~30 people into orbit for $10 million per launch, then an eighth of the worldwide tourist budget could launch a million people a year. Though, presumably if you were launching that many people, the cost would actually be a fair bit less.