Going from Point A to Point B in one jump is unlikely. Companies are unlikely to spend a billion dollars or more on risky rocket technology for a market that seems fanciful. For example, consider the old Mercury space capsule, which put a single astronaut into orbit and weighed three thousand pounds. With a Proton booster, payload cost into orbit is just two thousand dollars per pound, so the entire capsule could be placed into orbit for just two million dollars. According to the graph, with tickets costing only two million dollars each, several hundred people are willing to go into space.
Total revenue runs close to a billion dollars.
Thanks to the cube-square law, bigger capsules can carry more people with a lower capsule weight per passenger. Beal shut down because of fear that NASA was going to build a reusable launch vehicle of its own, and also because satellite launch service demand was much lower than anticipated. But just maybe, we can climb even further up the demand curve without new launch vehicles. One reason launch vehicles are so expensive is because we build so few of them. High tourist demand, however, would stimulate mass production, which would create scales of economy.