China will build a suborbital rocket for point to point travel

Space is the next frontier without any doubt, and as the concept of flying to space just for leisure becomes every day more common, a flight from New York to Beijing could be completed unas little as 2 hours thanks to suborbital space travel. A Chinese company is developing a rocket with wings for commercial traveling.

The idea is both flying people to space and point to point travel. Of these two, the last one could be the one that finally makes space travel something ubiquitous and turns it into a reality. The company produced a stunning video with a CGI model of their rocket. It shows passengers boarding their spacecraft, boosted by two massive rocket boosters.

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Just like the space shuttle, the plane decouples itself from the wing after take off and continues climbing all the way up to suborbital space. Both the wings and the boosters return to their pad while the craft continues and lands standing on its tail, vertically.

The manufacturers of the spacecraft are aiming at a 2025 first test flight with 2030 as a limit to start operations. The cost of suborbital space travel is most definitely excessive, so it will be just a curiosity or a service left for the wealthiest people on earth. There is still no information on potencial prices of a point to point trip, but taking into account the amount of money required to travel with Virgin Galactic to name one company, we can almost be sure it will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per ticket.

It is planned for the craft to travel at around 2,600 mph, which would make it twice as fast as the iconic Concorde. It is expected to make a trip between Beijing and New York in about 1 or 2 hours. The project has as a goal to enhance China’s space sector capabilities, taking advantage of the possibilities for the very new sector of space tourists. The project has so far around $47 million dollars in investments, mostly backed by Matrix Partners china, a Shanghai based industrial investment group.