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Virgin Galactic Successfully Reaches Space (bbc.com)
The latest test flight by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic successfully rocketed to space and back. From a report: The firm's SpaceShipTwo passenger rocket ship reached a height of 82.7km, beyond the altitude at which space is said to begin. It marked the plane's fourth test flight and followed earlier setbacks in the firm's space programme. Sir Richard is in a race with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to send the first fee-paying passengers into space. He founded the commercial spaceflight company in 2004, shortly after Mr Musk started SpaceX and Jeff Bezos established Blue Origin. In 2008, Virgin Galactic first promised sub-orbital spaceflight trips for tourists would be taking place "within 18 months". It has since regularly made similar promises to have space flights airborne in the near future.
While I appreciate that's their long-term goal, 3.5 hours from New York to London/Paris was already tried with the Concorde. There's not enough demand to make it economically sustainable. So it'll be primarily rich people on vacation joyriding this, not people who need to get between New York and Hong Kong in 2 hours for business reasons (i.e. spending money to make money).
Of course if they can get their cost per mile below that of Concorde (New York to London cost about $10,000 without discounts), that will be a breakthrough.
Karman did some calculations on where lift becomes irrelevant (this depends on design parameters for the wing, so a different altitude for each design), arrived at an altitude of 85 km and rounded up to 100 km.
Branson has some precedent: the USAF defined 80 km as the boundary of space, in order to be able to call their X-15 pilots astronauts.