It’s been a while since I blogged about Virgin Galactic but I was reading this article today and I figured it was worth doing a little something about. VG is almost ready to start flying passengers aboard their suborbital rockets. As is succinctly summarized in the article, one  wonders what the commercial value of these flights really are. The flights can go 68 miles up but that’s pretty far from being a usable orbit. Low Earth Orbit is generally defined as somewhere around 200 miles up. Any reasonable person is going to ask whether a commercial sub-orbital service makes sense when the tickets cost $200,000 per flight. Is this a gimmick, or is it really a first step to the commercialization of space? Well, VG says that they plan on launching light satellites into orbit using this system. Their engineers evidently feel it’s not as much of a challenge as other scientists seem to claim. You do have to admit they won the X-prize pretty handily and are years ahead of the competition. The commercialization of space depends entirely on the cheapening of space flight. Perhaps if the VG flight system proves its worth commercially, it will inspire other entrepreneurs (or nations) to develop their own space flight. But it may be that sub-orbital commercial flight is also quite profitable. Imagine flying from Tokyo to New York in an hour or two! Surely that would be worth a several thousand dollar ticket.

Sub-orbitals may or may not be the first step in a new space race. But I think Virgin Galactic is probably the company to watch to find out the truth of that.