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 on

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.