Suborbital Tourism

[hesham]

Hi,

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/suborbital-tourism-is-stepping-stone-to.html

 

[FutureSpaceTourist]

Fast Forward Group & Point to Point Transport

The subject of the above article, the Fast Forward Group http://www.spaceworkscommercial.com/projects/fastforward, is an informal collection of aerospace companies interested in the possibility of suborbital point-to-point transportation. The companies range from the very large and established (eg Boeing and Lockheed) to NewSpace (eg XCOR and Spaceport America).

The web page has a number of papers, particularly looking at potential point-to-point markets and commercial prospects. There's also an interesting video of a talk given at Google in May 2009:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDKzodiDjE

I must admit that I'm sceptical about the viability of this market for some years to come.

Interestingly although some (slightly older) material lists Virgin Galactic as a group member, some later material doesn't. This is wild speculation but I wonder if Virgin - who have publicly expressed interest previously in point-to-point - have concluded it's just too soon to spend time on it yet?