Commerical Suborbital Point-to-Point

[krytek]

If the flight time could be chopped from 7 hours to perhaps 90 minutes,

VG's spaceships Mach 3, that's maybe 3 times faster than a jet.
Assuming it goes sufficiently high for the thin air to negate sonic booms,
90 minutes seems like a realistic target for a specially designed craft.

[go4mars]

Remember I said near future and large demand. A suborbital flight for a few thousand dollars is completely unrealistic.

Why is it unrealistic?  These could potentially be used several times more often than a sub-sonic aircraft (because of their greater speed).  That means capital costs get back even sooner.  And I mean that the time for an average business class traveler (who is paying 5-10k for a day long travel) is probably worth at least that.  So these tickets could reasonably be $10-20k.  20k times 200 people x 8 flights per day = $32 million in daily revenue per unit.  Sure some of that is costs for methane and oxygen.  If there were 65 maintenance days in a given year, that's $9.6 billion in annual revenue for just one unit.         Probably optimistic projections, but even cut that in half or a third and that's still a descent pile by year end. 

Likewise, the operation of suborbital vehicles out of large suburban airports is completely unrealistic in the near future.

Why?  If several hundred test flights were safely made in the course of a year or two, without incident, then why would this be blocked?  I rather think a lot of cities would clamour to be first when they understand the potential revenue and increased business. You would have Toronto competing with New York, London competing with other european cities.  Some types of businesses would base their office wherever this form of transportation was available. 

Suborbital point-to-point will start as a small, infrequent, extremely expensive service.  Clongton's,  Robotbeat's and mrmandias's scenarios make more sense.

Likely.  But I think the pace of growth from there will be relatively brisk.  Big money will get pushed into commercializing it once the four R's (rapid reliable rocket reusability) has been established. 

[Cinder]

Very short average joe intuitive comment:

For some reason it seems like SOPTP would work better if the rest of the air transport system was more of a P2P swarm as Burt Rutan described in his BigThink video.
http://bigthink.com/users/burtrutan#!video_idea_id=18881

[krytek]

Great interview, thank you.
Interesting how he says an increase in cruise speed is not what's gonna make a big difference in total travel time.

*edit*  Just watched the last part.
Sounds like he thinks suborbital p2p isn't practical.

[mrmandias]

That means capital costs get back even sooner.  And I mean that the time for an average business class traveler (who is paying 5-10k for a day long travel) is probably worth at least that.  So these tickets could reasonably be $10-20k. 

Who knows what the future will bring.  But I doubt that the average transatlantic traveler’s time is wroth $5-$10k per 7 hours.  That translates to something like $ 1.2-2.5 million a year.  Your argument also assumes that the transit time is completely wasted, but with laptops and smartphones  and netbooks that’s not true either.

[Bob Shaw]

Did not Rotary Rocket at one point do a deal with FedEx (my memory is slightly dim as to the players involved) which involved the ability to not just do sub-orbital package deliver across the Pacific but also to deliver *the day before* the item was posted? They were going to use the International Date Line, and yes, it was a stunt - but boy, what a stunt! 'We deliver yesterday!' (some added charges apply)

Rocketmail has been around since the days of black powder and remains popular with water-jet rocketeers - I wonder what the commercial realities of the sub-orbital philatelic market would actually be? I have a first day cover carried aboard Challenger in a GAS canister on STS-8, and a similar cover from the Columbus-500 flight. Both cost about $35, and you could easily get a couple of thousand in a cubic foot.

This might be a good Kickstarter project...

[Robotbeat]

Did not Rotary Rocket at one point do a deal with FedEx (my memory is slightly dim as to the players involved) which involved the ability to not just do sub-orbital package deliver across the Pacific but also to deliver *the day before* the item was posted? They were going to use the International Date Line, and yes, it was a stunt - but boy, what a stunt! 'We deliver yesterday!' (some added charges apply)

Rocketmail has been around since the days of black powder and remains popular with water-jet rocketeers - I wonder what the commercial realities of the sub-orbital philatelic market would actually be? I have a first day cover carried aboard Challenger in a GAS canister on STS-8, and a similar cover from the Columbus-500 flight. Both cost about $35, and you could easily get a couple of thousand in a cubic foot.

This might be a good Kickstarter project...

XCOR's EZ-Rocket delivered US mail in 2005. A stunt, of course, but still interesting.

I sort of imagine a scheme where small packages in a protective shell are sent on a suborbital trajectory, then captured mid-flight (after reaching terminal velocity) by some sort of quadrotor drone near the destination. High-precision, fully-dense metal parts 3d-printed at some centralized location could deliver a needed part to any part of a major city (or any place where such a terminal delivery drone was located) within an hour or so of it being printed (the drone taking care of "terminal" delivery). Also could work for rare treatments of diseases, or immediate responses to 911 calls in case of serious, life-threatening illnesses. Lots of holes in that plan, but it's nice to think outside the box.

[douglas100]

Remember I said near future and large demand. A suborbital flight for a few thousand dollars is completely unrealistic.

Why is it unrealistic? 

Because the technology to build such a vehicle does not currently exist.

We are not talking about just scaling up Lynx. We are talking about a winged vehicle with air breathing engines and rocket engines or some combined cycle engine like Skylon. The noise of pure rocket engines at a suburban airport is unacceptable. We are talking about a single stage vehicle with the performance of an ICBM.

It will need thermal protection which is robust enough to fly through adverse weather and needs little maintenance, and can be turned around almost immediately to get the utilisation you were talking about. The Shuttle TPS cannot meet such requirements. It will need new technology.

To get the performance needed, the vehicle will need a high mass fraction. It will be like flying a space launch vehicle fully loaded with propellant from a populated area. It will have much less engineering margin than an aircraft. An air liner crashing in a suburban area is bad enough: a crashing suborbital vehicle would be worse.

It will take a long time for a vehicle using such new technology to reach the standard of safety of modern aircraft. It will not happen in the near future.

And you haven't convinced me that it would ever be cheap enough compared with ordinary aviation to create a mass transportation market.

A specialized rapid delivery system for special personnel or very high value products, as discussed in some of the other posts on this thread is much more believable.

[grr]

Before doing humans, I would do cargo. Much easier to fly and more profitable.

In fact, with all of the drone technology, it might make sense to simply do an automated system (think spaceX's cargo and human version of falcon). Ideally, the system would be smaller for cargo, but could be scaled up later.

[simonbp]

Clongton's,  Robotbeat's and mrmandias's scenarios make more sense.

I agree that they're more likely to have someone try them, as they require less initial capital. But there just isn't a profitable market for them; if there were, it wouldn't be so hard to get investors behind supersonic bizjets. Small companies will try, and fail, and then noone will want to touch them afterwards...

If you want a *commercial* suborbital transport that actually make a profit, you have to go big and aim squarely at long-distance passenger transport. The actual market analysis behind both the Boeing 2707 and Reaction Engines LAPCAT have shown that, though actual mathematics, and the 747 is the subsonic existence proof.

Unless and until someone gets the funding to build a big suborbital vehicle, it's not going to happen at all. And unless some rich tech investor takes some interest in it, that won't be until well after orbital RLVs become common.

[HMXHMX]

Did not Rotary Rocket at one point do a deal with FedEx (my memory is slightly dim as to the players involved) which involved the ability to not just do sub-orbital package deliver across the Pacific but also to deliver *the day before* the item was posted? They were going to use the International Date Line, and yes, it was a stunt - but boy, what a stunt! 'We deliver yesterday!' (some added charges apply)

Rocketmail has been around since the days of black powder and remains popular with water-jet rocketeers - I wonder what the commercial realities of the sub-orbital philatelic market would actually be? I have a first day cover carried aboard Challenger in a GAS canister on STS-8, and a similar cover from the Columbus-500 flight. Both cost about $35, and you could easily get a couple of thousand in a cubic foot.

This might be a good Kickstarter project...

No,we didn't.  We talked to a lot of folks about a lot of things, but never signed any deals like that.  Personally, I don't really buy the P2P arguments.  The speed gain you get is negated by the time it will take to clear customs, plus the mismatch in departure/arrival times.  And that's if you can solve the cost/price issues and the technology challenges.

[go4mars]

The speed gain you get is negated by the time it will take to clear customs

It's not like someone can high-jack it en route to crash it into a building.  The trajectory is basically fixed.  That should highly streamline security concerns.  In my experience, customs has never been more than a 15 minute line followed by 3 minutes of questions (at least in "western" countries).  And I travel a LOT.   

plus the mismatch in departure/arrival times.

That just gets the 'jet-lag' adjustment started sooner.  It doesn't introduce something new. 

[Robotbeat]

...

plus the mismatch in departure/arrival times.

That just gets the 'jet-lag' adjustment started sooner.  It doesn't introduce something new. 

I think he means the mismatch between different customers.

[go4mars]

I think he means the mismatch between different customers.

I still don't understand.  What mismatch?  Like Larry has a 3:00 meeting in Timbuktu, but Bryan's isn't until 7:00? 

[Robotbeat]

I think he means the mismatch between different customers.

I still don't understand.  What mismatch?  Like Larry has a 3:00 meeting in Timbuktu, but Bryan's isn't until 7:00? 

That sort of thing, yes. If there's a big enough difference between those two times, then Bryan might as well take a conventional flight. The time difference problem lowers the number of seats you could profitably have per vehicle in a certain size market. A lower number of seats per vehicle will tend to increase the cost per seat, thus shrinking the market.

[HMXHMX]

I think he means the mismatch between different customers.

I still don't understand.  What mismatch?  Like Larry has a 3:00 meeting in Timbuktu, but Bryan's isn't until 7:00? 

That sort of thing, yes. If there's a big enough difference between those two times, then Bryan might as well take a conventional flight. The time difference problem lowers the number of seats you could profitably have per vehicle in a certain size market. A lower number of seats per vehicle will tend to increase the cost per seat, thus shrinking the market.

Exactly.

I once told the SUSTAIN folks that it didn't matter if they could get troops somewhere in two hours, because the National Command Authority would take two days dithering over actually making the mission a  "go."  In other words, they could be flown to the target by subsonic aircraft in comfort and at vastly lower expense.

P2P has similar problems.  Besides cost, external factors (inlcuding time zones, customs) marginalize its utility.

[Robotbeat]

Those externalities aren't all laws of physics, though. They could be changed.

I completely agree, though, that it's a pretty crappy market. Initially, at least.

[go4mars]

I don't see those as critical issues.  If the market is too small for frequent enough departure times, I think people would adapt to whatever the schedule is.  For example, if your "airline" had only one of these things (which is unlikely), you could have it leave New York area at 6:00 AM, perhaps 90 minutes later you would disembark in London at 2:30 PM.  Enough time for several hours of useful business there the same day. 

The same unit could depart from London at 5:00 PM, and land 90 minutes later in New York at 11:30 AM. 

At 2:00 PM, another flight could leave New York for London, arriving there at 10:30 PM (allowing travellers to check into a hotel for the night instead of having to sleep on an airplane).  Then they are more refreshed for their morning meetings. 

The same unit leaves London at 1:00 AM, arriving in New York at 7:30 PM, in time for them to check in for some shut-eye without having to sleep on a plane. 

This is all with just one unit!

Swap out city names and routes.  There are many such combinations. 


I travel enough to know that I don't rest well on airplanes even in business class (though it's certainly preferable to economy).  If the ticket price were within a few thousand dollars of business class prices, many business-class travellers would adjust their schedule to go on the far more novel and convenient trip above the air.  But that's just my guess based on my own experience and preference.  The fact that I'm on this forum probably means I'm somewhat more likely to be an early adaptor compared to the average person.           Regardless, I've never been handed a survey by an airline that asked the question.  The market size remains a question mark.  I still think that some tiny portion of the $700 billion/year airline industry would support this instead.  Somewhat analogous to "Jet-Setters" who paid more back in the day for speedier service.   

[A_M_Swallow]

I don't see those as critical issues.  If the market is too small for frequent enough departure times, I think people would adapt to whatever the schedule is.  For example, if your "airline" had only one of these things (which is unlikely), you could have it leave New York area at 6:00 AM, perhaps 90 minutes later you would disembark in London at 2:30 PM.  Enough time for several hours of useful business there the same day. 

The same unit could depart from London at 5:00 PM, and land 90 minutes later in New York at 11:30 AM. 
{snip}

This was tried by Concorde.  The aircraft was only sold to British Airways and Air France.  After the crash it normally flew half empty.

[Jim]

many business-class travellers would adjust their schedule to go on the far more novel and convenient trip above the air.

No,  Concorde experience says you are wrong