Comment Re:Fuck you Wired (Score 1) 594
Known physics, the actual economy, and dwindling resources are not on our side.
Actually, the price of travelling by boat has basically increased over time. This is due to the fact that boating is mostly for pleasure. Who crosses the Atlantic by boat nowadays ? Not the poor.
In the case of Virgin Galactic, starry-eyed people believe that some day everyone will get to travel in one of these hypersonic planes, but I don't see that happening. The reason is that it is much much cheaper and immensely less dangerous to fly economy with any carrier. Basically the longest flight is something like London-UK to Auckland-NZ. That currently takes about 30h. Of course it would be nice to do it in 2h but this is not essential. The Concorde did not make supersonic flight happen for the masses. It was only for the very rich / super busy and would have stayed that way forever had the Concorde continued to be exploited.
Concurrently, really going to space (i.e. > 100km altitude, reaching orbital velocity) is going to stay hugely expensive using chemical rockets. There is basically no known technique that can make that cheap and safe, until we build a space elevator. Going to the Moon is essentially pointless: nothing of value to do there, and I'm not sure we will manage to send people to Mars within this century. This is hugely hard, barring some unexpected advances in thrust technology.