There's no clear path from their current style of rocket to "trips into orbit, around moon". It's dead-end tech - VG going orbital would require either a totally new vehicle (for which little of the current one's work applies) or buying rides with something like SpaceX.
> There wasn't a direct path from search to self-driving cars, for example.
Google went in the self-driving car direction only after a) search became wildly profitable and b) search expanded to things like mapping, street view, and heavy investment in AI.
VG isn't in a similar situation - there's little reason to believe suborbital rides for tourists is going to be raking in billions of dollars of cash.
That article proves my point pretty well - they were talking about commercial operations starting in 2009. It's almost 2019 now, and they haven't had a single commercial flight.
Is this actually even a real possible thing? "Tourism" is actually pretty well defined since governments and industry take great interest in it, and generally that definition is something along the lines of:
>"The activities of people traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for more then one day and less then one consecutive year for leisure with no compensation from the destination."
That effectively matches common sense: someone is not a tourist if they're just going somewhere local, nor a tourist of City X if they're connecting through a City X airport and have a few hours layover there, and if they flat out move somewhere for a year+ (or even a few continuous months in many jurisdictions) then they're into "resident" territory which has different implications as well.
I don't think spending a few minutes somewhere is tourism, it's at most a joyride from the actual place that person is staying. I guess a suborbital near-space habitat might in principle be possible, but I don't think those could ever reach space? I think the highest high-altitude balloon ever remains BU60-1, which got to 50-someodd km. Which is impressive but far below 100km. Humans have reached 40+km with a balloon, so real mass is possible to lift but I haven't crunched the math on how ginormous a balloon would be needed to support multiple people for any significant time period. And would a rocket plane actually be worth using for a rendezvous there anyway?
All of which is kind of fun and cool to think about, but also to say that it's hard to see a case for this.
We have no idea. They were shooting for 50,000 tourists in 10 years. They have other business ideas.
My point is that people are dismissing the entire VG project, while I see it as forward progress, which could easily be a catalyst for many other possibilities.
