Fly from New York to China in 2 Hours by 2020

Have you ever sat in your 19 floor beach-side mansion and thought to yourself: “If only I could fly to Bejing and back in one day, that would make it much easier to attend Francine’s ballet recital”? Well now for those with copious amounts of funding, it’s going to be made possible.

Set for release in 2020, Sub-orbital commuter flights will be jet setting the worlds top 0.01% across the globe at a blistering pace of 40,000 miles per hour. Compared to the current 500 mph of commercial airliners, the speed does however come at a great price – between $90,000 and $250,000 we’ve learned.

Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson has indicated he’s looking into this business model to bring it to the public sector.

Aaron Pressman from Yahoo Finance commented on some issues with this technology development, showing it’s not quite ready for the general business man or woman:

“These [jets] can only take off and land in very special places like the spaceport that’s in New Mexico . That’s not going to help the 0.1% get from New York to London or Australia. So it’s going to take a while before these rockets become more like normal airplanes that can land at normal airports. [sic]” Yahoo

However, if this technology is worked on and improved, we could possibly see our grandchildren jet-setting across the globe in minimal time for current commercial airliner pricing.

Image courtesy of Neowin