The European Suborbital Shuttle

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Following the trail of SpaceShipTwo, Dassault has been working on a new suborbital civilian spacecraft. Not to be confused with the Future High-Altitude High-Speed Transport 20XX, the new aircraft could be a 11-ton vehicle derived from their VEHRA satellite launcher.

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An artist rendering of VEHRA

VEHRA and VSH—the name of the new civilian vehicle—are both air launched, and "based on the X-38 experimental lifting body from NASA, for which Dassault Aviation had defined the shape." While VEHRA will have heavy versions capable of putting a 7-ton payload in low orbit, VSH is only designed to bring tourists into the edge of space, flying at Mach 3.5.

If you don't have the money for this kind of trip, don't worry. It looks like you have plenty of time to save those purple rupees, as the aircraft is still in the first stages of development.

Source

So I thought this was worthy of sharing and quite interesting. Always something new coming out. I would love to have one of these.

can someone explain the point of a suborbital shuttle to me?

is this a form of high speed transport from one location on the planet to another?

or is this just for tourists to get near space?

surely you cant really launch anything into space from it as it doesnt ever achieve orbit?

sooooo whats the real point of this?

someone help me out here

danka

cool. kinda looks like Hermes .. is this version 2.0?

Originally posted by maintainright
can someone explain the point of a suborbital shuttle to me?

is this a form of high speed transport from one location on the planet to another?

or is this just for tourists to get near space?

surely you cant really launch anything into space from it as it doesnt ever achieve orbit?

sooooo whats the real point of this?

someone help me out here

danka

You could launch a satellite from it with a small booster like NASA's Payload Assist Modules.

Originally posted by maintainright
can someone explain the point of a suborbital shuttle to me?

is this a form of high speed transport from one location on the planet to another?

or is this just for tourists to get near space?

surely you cant really launch anything into space from it as it doesnt ever achieve orbit?

sooooo whats the real point of this?

someone help me out here

danka

What was the point of SpaceShipOne?

What was the point of the Bell X-15?

Advancement. Thats what.

With a suborbital platform, you get to solve a significant portion of the same problems facing an orbital platform, but at a fraction of the price. Once you have those solutions, applying them to an orbital platform saves you significant amounts of money.