I used to work for an air charter company so know a bit about biz jets. Stross is missing an important point: there are only a handful of heavy jets that can fl

I used to work for an air charter company so know a bit about biz jets. Stross is missing an important point: there are only a handful of heavy jets that can fly non-stop from LHR to SYD. The Global Express (and variants), Dassault's 7X/8X and that's about it. They cost from $50 million up, can seat a maximum of 8 to 10 people and are impossible to charter "by the seat". They also require long runways, restricting which airports they can use compared to smaller biz jets. If something like the Sabre existed I can guarantee that high net-worth people in Europe/America with urgent business meetings (or a desire to maximise their holiday) in Australia would use it even if it meant needing to charter a helicopter to/from the space port to the centre of the city. Whether or not there would be enough demand to keep a regularly scheduled service going is another question. Stross is right when he says it's hard to see how it could compete with existing air transport options between shorter range locations (e.g. London - New York). Sabre (or similar) would have advantages for New York (or London) to Beijing though, so, who knows, in another 10 or 20 years maybe there will be enough demand for a few well chosen scheduled routes. In any case, I don't buy the terrorism angle at all. The problem will be (as is often the case in commercial aviation) finding and pricing route(s) to produce a viable passenger yield. Tricky if the only routes that make sense are long-haul ones with a high density of frequent first class business flyers (that's a pretty small pool).