Dave,
I think VG is getting very, very close. I haven't been following their
progress but perhaps by end of this year or next this statement may no longer
be true?
suborbital flights have been real 4 decades, there don't live the least sense to invent wheels. vg Just has wasted Time & Nothing more. their scheme is about to be ridiculously unreliable + costly: feathers have big chance to fail!

Musk claims to have booked considerable amount of business for Falcon 9
already with or w/o NASA COTS. Time will tell, not much time mind you.
musk has no any idea WTF & WTH Space Industry is XD

You need to provide evidence of this. I don't see any. Musk's plan is to make
Dragon re-usable at the outset. And the next gen of Dragon is to land on land
to speed refurbishment.

put your eyes onto Tsiolkovsky equation, it'd be helpful.