Astrium has officially shelved its nutty suborbital project:

“The world economic situation has created a difficult near term environment in which to finalise ongoing discussions with investors. Astrium is to temporarily slow down the technical activities focusing on core risk mitigation for the project. The [space jet] team achieved impressive results in the pre-development phase particularly in the field of propulsion technology. Astrium sees suborbital flight as a promising area because of the emerging space tourism market.”

They had no sensible business case even in a booming economy. There was never any way that a vehicle with a billion-dollar development cost was going to compete with the other players.

Unless, of course, they were hoping to pull a Concorde, and have the taxpayers pick up the tab.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Doug Messier, with a roundup of the competition.