Jeff Foust has an extensive description of Virgin Galactic's plans, based on Will Whitehorn's talk at last week's ISDC:

Virgin is open to other uses of suborbital spaceflight, such as point-to-point transportation, although Whitehorn noted that they are not actively pursuing it because they would then be treated as an airline from a regulatory standpoint, with strict limitations on the flights that a foreign-owned airline can offer in the US. Instead, Virgin is looking at the possibility of orbital spaceflight. “If, by year five, we’ve got this business into profit—and we believe we can do it before year five—we will embark on the next phase of the project, which is to create an orbital commercial system,” Whitehorn said.

If that happens, Whitehorn believes such a system will do far more than provide another source of revenue for Virgin Galactic. “I’m a firm believer that this will provide the foundation for the actual colonization of space,” he said. “That is really what this project is all about to us.”

Glad it's about that to someone, because it sure doesn't seem to be to NASA.

Which means there's a good chance that they will have an orbital delivery system designed, built and operational while NASA is dealing with yet another delay in its latest CEV redesign.

I'm telling you we need to get this guy to dock his Hotel to the ISS.

Might a private Brit company (no ITAR) get to LEO before CEV?

I don't think Bigelow would ever dock his hotel to the ISS, he needs a hotel in a useful orbit and he doesn't need NASA setting a bunch of rules for how he can operate it.

The only thing worse than getting rules from NASA is trying to work with the FAA. Talk about a nightmare!

> I don't think Bigelow would ever dock his hotel to the ISS, he needs
> a hotel in a useful orbit

What is not useful about the ISS orbit? If you're going to operate a hotel for sightseers, you want an orbit that passes over their homes, not an equatorial orbit that's mostly over water.

An equatorial orbit would be easier to reach, so that would probably keep the costs down. If you can get me into orbit affordibly, I don't care whether I can see my home or not.

I think the first hotels are going to be equatorial for the above reasons. But a hotel in a higher inclination will be more interesting. I imagine this will be one of many ways that a hotel can distinguish itself.

Any commercial entity worth its salt will build an orbital access system that can reach most orbits. They may have to cut the number of passengers in some cases, however.