Sending up balloons very, very rarely causes people to die, you know. That was kind of the issue here. That what SC2 is doing is not worth dying for, not that it's not worthwhile at all.

Sure, there are some niche scientific uses for suborbital flights. But that is still isn't the same as managing orbital flight.

The ASM-135 was also suborbital, you'll note.

No, what I am saying is that if the Wright brothers started today, nobody would think they were doing useful work.

I seem to be arguing with a child. My mistake.

No, being a kinetic weapon it would gain a lot of destructive power by not being in a nearby orbit. The satellite would slam into it at orbital speed.

That would all make sense if we didn't already know how to get into space.

I don't know if you've notice, but we do. We don't need to take baby steps to get there, we can already go. This isn't a scheme to figure out how to get into space, it's a thrill ride for rich people.

The people who are actually trying to get into space aren't doing anything like this. They are building things that actually go into space.

An anti-satellite rocket does not need to achieve orbital velocity, though.

That's going to take a seriously huge ship, which will be very different from the SpaceShipTwo, not to mention the gigantic plane to carry both of them up.

Because I have not said a single thing that is not actually true?

If you want to discuss things, learn how to behave in polite conversation. I have zero interest in ever talking to you again now.

More energy, yes. And more energy means more fuel. More fuel means more mass. More mass means even more energy. And so on. To scale up to the point where you can actually reach orbit will require a vastly different design, far bigger and heavier. And at that point, what you learned from the SpaceShipTwo no longer really applies much.

We sure have better space travel than the SpaceShipTwo could ever provide, though.

Like the other guy says, reaching orbit is hard. We're not going to suddenly have a miraculous development that gives us super-powerful engines that makes it possible for something like the SpaceShipTwo to reach it. And if we did, anything the SpaceShipTwo had learned would pale into utter insignificance compared to the massive possibilities of that miracle engine.

Is that carbon fiber worth dying for, then?

Not really. I'm saying we have rockets that can actually take us into space right now, and we've had them for a long time. The SpaceShipTwo is nowhere near in their league, and saying that we can learn something about going into space from the puny little ship that can't do it, rather than from the ones we've been sending up there for over half a century, is about as ludicrous as saying that we would learn something useful for commercial airliners by flying a propeller plane over the Atlantic.