If XCOR achieves the turnaround time in the Economist article on suborbital adventure travel that Rand spotted of 4 flights per day, that puts them with higher capacity per plane per day than Rocketplane’s 3. (Full disclosure: I have business dealings with both firms.) Assuming that their two-seater does not take more people than Rocketplane’s to service, that should give them a revenue advantage in a Boom town scenario and a cost advantage in the Dullsville scenario. If Xerus indeed costs only about $10 million to develop vs. more than $40 million for Rocketplane (according to Chuck Lauer at ISDC), then they will have lower implicit interest costs too. Number of lifetime flights and flights per major overhaul are interesting questions that will also factor in. Since neither plane has flown, a 33% difference in servicing time per passenger is quite speculative at this point, but interesting.

This cost/revenue disadvantage per plane won’t be a problem for Rocketplane if it can fly 100 flights of 3 passengers in their first year and earn $60 million before any of the competitors can bring their planes on line (although Carmack is optimistic he will start flying next year according to what he told me at Space Access).

In a boom town scenario, RLI, Virgin, Armadillo, Blue, Masten, SpaceDev, XCOR and probably a few new players will all build more craft than they were originally anticipating. This will result in lots of business for the low cost/high value player, but probably several bankruptcies or mergers eventually.