Branson's Virgin Galactic hopes to take paying passengers on three-hour suborbital flights by early 2009.
He called attention to the fact that passenger suborbital flights will be risky business.
That is about four times further than any of today's private suborbital craft are trying to reach.
Back in 2008, he moved to exempt revenues from suborbital passenger ticket sales from the corporate income tax.
Nevertheless, studies by the Futron Corporation, an aerospace consultancy, suggest that suborbital space travel is a promising market.
Amazon.com co-founder and CEO Bezos is bankrolling Blue Origin , which aims to design and build small suborbital vehicles.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos is developing a suborbital vehicle at his company Blue Origin.
Beginning in 2012, the FAA could regulate suborbital spaceships however it saw fit.
It promotes Axe's new cologne "Apollo" and its contest to send someone on the first suborbital space tour in 2014.
Stern also chairs the Commercial Spaceflight Federation's Suborbital Applications Researchers Group and is a former NASA associate administrator for science.
More than 70% surveyed would spend two weeks or less on a suborbital tourism flight and 88% were interested in spacewalking.
If suborbital craft are regulated as if they were normal aircraft, then they could cost several hundred million dollars to certify.
There is little doubt that Branson, the founder of multiple companies, including a suborbital spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, is a visionary.
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Like other suborbital providers, XCOR eventually wants to develop an orbital vehicle.
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Other firms, such as Masten Space Systems, also of Mojave, are focusing on suborbital launchers that fly experiments and payloads, not passengers.
Yet to be demonstrated is the hoped-for flight rates of suborbital vehicles.
Financial backer of SpaceShipOne, first to launch private flight into suborbital space.
The carrier vehicle will ferry suborbital craft SpaceShipTwo, modeled after Ansari X Prize winner SpaceShipOne, 50, 000 feet in the sky before releasing it.
For the suborbital space flights of the sort that billionaire Richard Branson 's Virgin Galactic hopes to run, energy won't be as costly.
American astronaut Alan Shepard made a suborbital flight later that year, and John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962.
Quick turnaround of these craft is central to realizing the profit-making potential of over-and-over sojourns by piloted and unpiloted vessels to the suborbital heights.
What's so important about an expensive, suborbital joy ride, I ask?
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Companies preparing for commercial suborbital passenger service include Virgin Galactic, a U.S.-based offshoot of Branson's Virgin Group of London, and XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif.
Other companies are also jumping in the suborbital space race.
Such issues led Congress to draft the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, which was designed to make clear that suborbital craft should be regulated as rockets.
Mr Sirangelo emphasised SNC's stepwise approach to getting into space, with the first launches going only suborbital (a short hop above the atmosphere) followed eventually by fully orbital sorties.
Blu licenses an industrial-grade engineering software system called CATIA used by Boeing to design airliners, Virgin Galactic to build its suborbital space ship and automakers to create cars.
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They flew on two suborbital and four Earth-orbital Mercury launches, nine Earth-orbital Gemini flights, two Earth-orbital Apollo tests, and two lunar-orbital tests that made those lunar surface landings possible.
One group preparing to sell suborbital flights is Virgin Galactic, whose parent company is partnering with California-based Scaled Composites to develop SpaceShipTwo, the successor to 2004's Ansari X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne.
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