Virgin Galactic may start flying again, although itās very hard to see the current business case for this thing:
The super-rich who want a real orbital spaceflight will go with SpaceX, or possibly book a ride on a Soyuz. People who just want a lot of zero-g time for a lower price will take a ride on a vomit-comet jet. For the subset of very rich folks who want a quick hop into space thereās already the Bezos phallic rocket, which hasnāt killed anyone yet and has a launch escape system that was recently shown to work. No way that Branson can get enough paying customers and have the launch cadence to make this thing profitable.
Could Bransonās design theoretically be used to ferry passengers long distances very quickly (say, taking a suborbital space flight across the Atlantic) or is it wholly useless for anything other than ālook how high I flewā?
As far as I can tell the latter. Just a quick dash above the KƔrmƔn line, and then back down.
Truth be told, if I had that kind of money to throw away and could be reasonable sure that I wouldnāt undergo a rapid unscheduled disassembly myself I would book a flight just for the heck of it.
Rutanās design is really clever and he did win the Ansari X-Prize with it in 2004. That was a breakthrough and proof of concept. But they somehow failed to turn that into something reliable and sustainable, let alone scaling it up to orbital flights, in two decades.
New York to London - 5,500km
KƔrmƔn line - 100km-ish
Lobbing a small vehicle to 100km would require a glide slope that defies physics to provide any savings.
I was promised New York to Paris in 90 minutes, undersea, in a train all graphite and glitter.
And donāt even get me started on the spandex jackets.
Well they did partner with Northrop to make the super-duper huge variant to do rocket drops. But dropping liquid rockets is not an easy thing to do reliably. They went all in and got passed by SpaceX
You just need to bore a hole between any two points, make a vacuum in the hole, then using frictionless bearings to keep you centered you can connect any two points in 84 minutes. The hardest part is the engineering. The theory is sound.
Iād rather take a Zeppelin than the Gravitube.
The development of that system has been excruciatingly slow as well. They rolled out rhe plane way back in 2017 and have only done 9 test flights since then. Slow-and-steady may win the race sometimes, but there are limits to how slow you can be without becoming obsolete before completion.
Thanks! The article mentioned the āMars Sample Returnā mission, which Iād somehow missed. Holy crap!
I think those were different lyrics
The Concorde got JFKāCDG down to about 200 minutes, and āundersea by railā was the Chunnel
At this point āI.G.Y.ā is about the past
Normally, I wouldnāt get excited about a contest where the first prize is a trip to Cleveland. Thereās an old joke that says āFirst prize is a trip to Cleveland! And the second prize is two trips to Cleveland.ā
But for thisā¦ yeah, thatād be cool.
If Iām still near Sydney in 2028, Iām set. 
Does it require perfectly spherical cows?
Only the sphericalist will do.
