Volpe National Transportation Systems Center

Point-to-point Commercial Space Transportation in National Aviation System: Final Report Volpe National Transportation Systems Center

The advent of suborbital transport brings promise of point-to-point (PTP) long distance transportation as a revolutionary mode of air transportation. In 2008, the International Space University (ISU) of Strasbourg, France, published a report1 documenting its appraisal of PTP transportation technology. This report describes the conditions that should be put in place to foster and sustain the growth of this industry from the technical, market, financial, infrastructure, safety, and legal perspectives. The ISU study calculates that transatlantic flight times for suborbital vehicles from London to New York would take less than 1 ¼ hours, less than one-third the travel time required by the supersonic aircraft Concorde and a fraction of that required by conventional commercial aircraft. This potential for the rapid global transport of passengers and the fast distribution of goods and services make PTP transportation an attractive space technology concept worth exploiting.