| There is a proven market for orbital flights for communication satellites, cube sats, space exploration, sending people to the space station, etc. There aren't really that many commercial uses for unmanned suborbital flights. For instance if you just want to test something in zero gravity for a short time maybe you can do your experiment faster in a drop tower. Manned suborbital flights are so expensive that the market is this tiny intersection of people who can afford it and who want to do it. If it was $500 you would get lots of people to sign up, but at current prices I think there's no way to sell enough seats to pay back the development costs of the machine. Eric Berger wrote a great book on SpaceX https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac... There are a lot of government reports on the subject from the 1980-2000 range where people were considering the needs of launching for the strategic defense initiative, this is a typical one https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/CSAT/documents/O... but not the one I was really looking for. I would say follow up the references on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_vehicle and try to dig up more of the same. |