[Flieger]

Originally Posted by island911

Can you explain the draw to this $200k joy ride?

I mean this is hardly space travel. ...the mother ship (a jet) takes you to 50,000ft, drops, and the rocket pushes you up another 20k ft.

For perspective, the google exec guy went about twice as high in a balloon ... and then jumped out.

Um,

Originally Posted by Reuters

"More than 800 people have paid or put down deposits to eventually fly aboard the spaceship, which is hauled to an altitude of about 45,000 feet (13.7 kms) and released by Virgin's White Knight Two carrier jet airplane. According to plans, the spaceship then fires its rocket motor to catapult it to about 62 miles (100 km) above Earth, giving passengers a view of the planet set against the blackness of space and a few minutes of weightlessness."

More like another 200k ft.

62 miles is about 325,000 ft, or about 200,000 ft. more than the skydivers. I believe the 100 km limit is partly based on it being higher than a balloon or airplane can fly- calculated with some sort of maximum feasible coefficient of lift for a wing along with other performance parameters, basically the plane would need to fly so fast that it would be in orbit (or escape velocity) at that point, not flying.