Spacex might have the control side worked out some years but their capsule is full of fuel you can't expose people to.
I would think the fuel costs even with 100% reusability would make rocket commute prohibitive.
http://www.uspa.org/BecomeaSkydiver/ChooseaSchool/tabid/437/...
If BO can demonstrate that the risks of a flight into space are comparable to other hazards we encounter in life (car driving, bungee jumping, heli-skiing, surgery), they're going to have plenty of people (myself included) who want to go.
New York to Tokyo is nearly half that circumference, so the energy required is nearly that of orbit.
This post has an illustration that makes the concept clear: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/108970-Help-with...
(Note: I'm approximating by assuming no forces other than gravity, which is an extremely good approximation for a ballistic rocket. In perpetually powered flight the trajectory can of course take other shapes.)
My experiments with Flappy Space Program contradict this. b^) It is perfectly possible to miss orbit even after a complete circumnavigation. Trajectories are shaped like parabolas, not ellipses.
New York to Tokyo is nearly half that circumference, so the energy required is nearly that of orbit.
Well it's more like a quarter, but even if it were half it would take significantly less energy than orbit.
Yes, if you have a source of lift, and you're within the atmosphere, then you can circumnavigate the globe without reaching orbital velocities. A ballistic rocket generally has no significant source of lift and spends nearly all of its time in space.
> Trajectories are shaped like parabolas, not ellipses.
All orbits are conic sections: either an ellipse, hyperbola, or a parabola (the limiting case between the two). But a parabolic or hyperbolic trajectory has escape velocity, whereas only an elliptic trajectory is planet-bound. The apogee of the ellipse is locally approximated well by a parabola, which is why for non-orbital mechanics ballistic trajectories are often modeled by a parabola, but all suborbital trajectories are actually ellipses, not parabolas. If the Earth were flat and the gravity vector were constant, then they would be actual parabolas.
Orbital mechanics is very counterintuitive. I recommend Fundamentals of Astrodynamics if you'd like to learn more, or play KSP rather than FSP.
> Well it's more like a quarter
On this you are correct, the map I looked at deceived me. :)
Math:
Reaching the edge of space requires 100 km altitude, or 1,000,000 m^2/s^2 of specific energy, which is 1,414 m/s velocity. Redirect that to a 45° angle and you have 1,000 m/s in both the vertical and horizontal direction, which comes close to maximizing your distance. That gives you 200 seconds of flight, which puts you 200 km downrange.
This seems to be ideal for transport as well? That is, if we're trying to get from Tokyo to NYC quickly, we never want to actually go into orbit, do we?