Commerical Suborbital Point-to-Point

[weasdown]

To make it profitable, you'd want a pretty large aircraft (think 777-class, 300-400 seats) that could fly at least once per day. {snip}

That seems a bit large.  There may only be 40-50 people a day who can afford the fare.  The number of people flying first class and business class may give an estimate.

Well that's the point. Most of the cost of operating the aircraft is in the fixed infrastructure and fuel. If you have the passengers to support it, you want the largest aircraft possible. A 747 is not cheap per flight, but it is cheap per seat, and that's what makes transatlantic travel affordable.

This is not a new analysis; the American response to the Concorde was the Boeing 2707, which had about 300 seats (and probably closer to 350 in a modern configuration). This was because Boeing did the math and realized that that was the minimum size that could be expected to be profitable (Concorde maxed out at 128 passengers).

The reason I focused on transoceanic flights is because they do have the traffic to easy fill many large suborbital transports daily. Even if the only suborbital service you had was New York-London, there would be enough passengers to justify 5-10 400-seat transports (depending on how much maintenance downtime they need). Add New York-LA and LA-Tokyo and you've just cornered a large sector of the world's long-distance market.

I think that if they are to succeed on short journeys, suborbital PTP transports are going to have to be very small (max. 20 seats) and that they will become more economical on longer range flights.
Although Concorde could carry 128 passengers, it typically only managed to fill 60-70 seats due to lack of demand.
However, if the distance was increased, say London to Tokyo or Sydney instead of New York, I think there would be more demand due to the larger time difference in travelling suborbitally compared with in conventional airliners, hence there would be more seats and the cost per passenger would decrease.

[Moe Grills]

If this point-to-point suborbital topic were to focus on altitude; not so much on horizontal destination, with altitudes over the Karman Line achieved, 3 minutes of zero-g experienced, then I suggest that you go over to my post at the "Advanced Concepts"  topic page and the "DLR LH/LOX spaceliner concept" thread.

I stated on that thread a selling point, among several,  from a concept I worked on, that if 100 passengers could experience 3 minutes of zero-G, altitudes over 63 miles, etc., at ticket prices between 15,000 - 25,000 dollars, then that is comparible to LUXURY cruise fares to Antarctic waters, etc., ranging upto and over 10,000 dollars per person.
How many go on those cruises? 1,000's?  10,000's of well-to-do tourists over the years?
Maybe SOME OF YOU have gone on those cruises.