The Europeans have also proposed a business jet model for a suborbital
tourism rocket:

DATE:14/06/07
SOURCE:Flightglobal.com
PICTURES: Astrium aims for 2012 suborbital tourism flights.
By Rob Coppinger
"The space jet will take off from a conventional runway, powered by
two jet engines, and fly to 39,300ft (12,000m), where it will ignite
its liquid oxygen, methane rocket engine providing an ascent
acceleration of 3g. After 80s the jet will reach 196,000ft and coast
to its apogee."
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles...m-flights.html

Interestingly, they consider this as a precursor to a point-to-point
transport.

Another article on the proposed Astrium rocketplane:

Space planes 'to meet big demand'.
By Jonathan Amos, Science reporter, BBC News
Monday, 17 March 2008, 13:38 GMT
"Aerospace giant EADS says it will need a production line of rocket
planes to satisfy the space tourism market."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7298511.stm

There is a link to a nice video of a simulated flight on this page. In
the video the passengers are wearing helmets with closed visors. But
it doesn't look like they are wearing actual spacesuits with
independent air supplies because the helmets are not connected to the
rest of the suits. The helmets have more the look of motorcycle
helmets. I don't know if this is really supposed


Bob Clark