And then some…
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Then Branson will be happy to take your $250,000 and send you to “space.”
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Space adjacent, anyway.
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Nope. I’m not very interested in suborbital joyrides. And even if I were, I wouldn’t take one on SpaceshipTwo, not even if you payed me the quarter mil.
I’d fly New Shepard or Dragon 2 or CST-100 or even Soyuz without a second thought, but SpaceshipTwo is outside my risk envelope. Too many unproven or poorly-characterized bits of tech with too many potential catastrophic-failure modes for my taste.
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And how much carbon did they burn to get there? Over the course of development?
These rich fuckoffs are intent on ruining everything to assuage their insecurity about their tiny dicks and inflate their snowflake egos. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
This is why we can’t have nice things. Like a planet to live on.
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One of the things I remember most about that experience was learning that the Fox News science correspondent seemed even more clueless off-camera than when he was on the air. After the takeoff he asked his crew “so now what happens?” and seemed genuinely surprised to learn the answer was “it flies up into space then comes back down and lands like an airplane.” Even though the press pass he was wearing around his neck clearly depicted the entire sequence in helpful cartoon form.
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Whether its astroids or Luna or Mars being strip-mined, all these plans are for the mineral wealth to be dropped back down the gravity well to make (someone on) Earth a tiny bit richer.
Im all for exploiting what’s out there. But dropping that stuff down the well is a huge short term boondoggle that gets humanity no closer to the (actual) stars.
The stuff that’s mined from the belt needs to be made into assets above the well, invested in the long term future. You can kid yourself that only the first round of loot will be sold dirtside, that the grateful 1% down here will eventually feel magnanimous and start investing for the long term in middle space… but wishful thinking isn’t going to get humans off-system.
Until the human economy has been made leakproof right here, there is no hope of creating human economies that can cross middle and deep space.
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And note how none of them orbit below 100 km.
Meh - it’s about what you’re trying to achieve. This is tourism - the customers are paying for
- freefall (check)
- looking down at earth from “space” (check)
So whether or not you are at 80 kms, 100kms, or stable orbit, you accomplish those two things. I’m sure the tourists would much rather orbit for awhile, but they know what they’re paying for.
I mean, I’d rather my car be a hovercar, but I know it’s not yet. Still counts as a car. 
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I’ve seen how tourism can take the experience of a place, and shape it for maximum economic exploitability. The place itself starts to change to what tourists expect.
I just joined my local astronomy club. Thats the kind of tourism aesthetic most appropriate for space.
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“Once the rockets go up -
who cares where they come down…”
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