Saturday,
28 January
∞
“Now, some people will say to you that Virgin space tourism counts as human spaceflight. But to put a bit of perspective on that, what they do is what Alan Shepard did in Freedom 7 in 1961 — a suborbital lob of fifteen minutes duration, an order of magnitude below what Yuri Gagarin did a month earlier. So what you can say about Virgin Galactic in 2012 is that it’s matched capability with, um, 1961.”
—

-Warren Ellis from here

This just backs up my belief that Virgin “Galactic” (Virgin Suborbitals was not as sexy.) is functionally a replacement for the Concord. It’s a sexy, fast, terrestrial transportation method. There’ve been grumblings from them about spaceports in Sweden and Dubai. New Mexico’s spaceport is a short hop from either coast, especially given Virgin’s buildup of traditional routes in the US over the last five years or so. (Virgin America was in fact founded in the same year as Virgin Galactic, though how long either plan was on the drawing board and if they were planned in tandem is impossible to say.) 

Imagine you end up with a half dozen of these planes and you cut down the travel time to Dubai by several hours and throw in 6 minutes of weightlessness in the bargain. This is all we’re going to get from that company: a cool looking airframe that is perhaps slightly more useful to human spaceflight as this: