suborbital

I think the key question for space and aviation enthusiasts is whether or not the Pentagon is building a hypersonic suborbital manned bomber.

Getting stuff into a suborbital trajectory is basically a subset of getting stuff into orbit.

There's been some confusing communication about SS3 being (or not being) a suborbital design.

And all of a sudden Blue Origin looks to be in the lead in the (very long) race to suborbital passenger flights.

The last SpaceX rocket successfully returned from suborbital flight onto the target landing site.

A suborbital trajectory is an ellipse that intersects the ground, and it will do so twice within less than half the world's circumference.

At the moment, true, and Blue Origin is not renowned for their development speed, but suborbital is clearly just a stepping stone for them.

Vehicles designed for suborbital tourism like Spaceship Two, Lynx, and New Shepard aren't traveling more than a couple hundred km without a second stage.

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.

Try to calculate what the cost of suborbital rocketry should be.

I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX could meet Virgin's price for a suborbital trip, if they felt it was worth their while.

Am I wrong for thinking this is lame for being suborbital?

I obviously think it is a huge step, and am definitely not saying I could do any better, but I'm more excited for (at the moment) SpaceX to do bigger things to actually get us into a "space age", not just suborbital hops.