Virgin Galactic successfully reaches space
Articles like this feel awfully fuzzy when it comes to how they suggest VG is in some kind of &quot;race&quot; with actual orbital companies. I&#x27;m just not seeing the path from A to B for VG&#x27;s current efforts there, and without that I&#x27;m also not seeing what their future is at all?<p>&gt;<i>The company said the space ship&#x27;s motor burned for 60 seconds, travelling at 2.9 times the speed of sound as it gained height.</i><p>So they managed to briefly beat the Concorde (top speed a bit of Mach 2) and are still well under half the speed of the X-15? I mean, good for them I guess but it seems pretty ridiculous to put VG in even vaguely the same game as anybody doing actual orbital work (not just SpaceX or BO but smaller outfits even). Mach 2.9 isn&#x27;t even 1 km&#x2F;s, and LEO average orbital is more like 7.8 km&#x2F;s (and required delta-v for that will likely be at least a good extra 1.5 km&#x2F;s over that accounting for drag&#x2F;grav). Yes &quot;space&quot; may start at 100 km as the atmosphere drops sufficiently, but I think what most people think about when it comes to &quot;going to space&quot; and doing something useful involves <i>orbit</i>, even for tourism purposes (orbital space hotels say). The challenges of every bit of it, from delta-v to heating to in-orbit survival is all on an entirely different plane.<p>Meanwhile with the BFR it looks quite possibly that SpaceX may well drop below $500&#x2F;kg to LEO, possibly by a lot. They claim to be aiming for $10m a flight which would be more like sub-$100&#x2F;kg, but I take that as more a long term aspirational goal approaching the costs of fuel a minimal maintenance then anything in the immediately realizable future. But even a conservative guess of more like $40m would still mean being able to get people into real orbit for less money then VG&#x27;s up-and-down. BO is pursuing similar cost economics, and both are fighting through the very hard R&amp;D work in actually getting scalable long term cost reductions like methalox working right now.<p>Can anyone explain what if anything about VG&#x27;s current R&amp;D would actually carry over to a real spacecraft, or what they use case for it would be if it can&#x27;t reach that? For merely going very high and very fast on Earth low boom supersonic R&amp;D seems more promising, and for actual space, well this isn&#x27;t it. What am I missing here?