obscenely rich wanker off on a jolly.

[Thumpalumpacus]

If Branson's even heading in that direction anymore.  He has the advantage of not needing a launchpad and being able to land on a more or less normal runway—at least if SpaceShipTwo requires a special length of landing strip, I don't know about it.

Up to this point, SpaceShipTwo has never flown as high as SpaceShipOne did.  SpaceShipOne crossed the Kármán Line, but SpaceShipTwo never has.  The next iteration of the craft, SpaceShip III, was originally designed for point-to-point flights, London to Sydney in two hours, that sort of thing... except they dialed it all the way back to just suborbital hops again.

Branson is so far going the route of reduced expectations, and point-to-point suborbital transit is falling into the same class as artificial intelligence and fusion power reactors—always ten to twenty years in the future, no matter what year one makes the prediction.

And to be perfectly fair, I don't really regard Branson's efforts as space-flight myself. I think it's more in line with German experimental thinking about skipping a V-2 off the boundary to enhance range while maintaining speed, and think that that's what Branson is chasing -- entirely suborbital, mainly unballistic, and in its own way the extreme of aerodynamics; using atmospheric layering rather than ballistic flight-plans for range.

I think Branson's reduced expectations hold more promise for moving people or cargo from point A to point B (on Earth) than either Bezos (who seems to be selling a thrill-ride) or Musk (who seems to be aiming at the space-cargo market, but has to wave his dick this month as well).