Mike wrote:

Whay does the shuttle and Spacelab need ? That sounds a good start.

Apparently the ISS is currently 349km high and whizzing over Egypt
http://science.nasa.gov/temp/StationLoc.html

Some nice formulae for calulating orbital speeds for a given altitude
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question...ft/q0164.shtml
for 300km it would be 17000mph

So this Virgin "spaceplane" they're building won't even get you near a
proper orbit then ? Does it reach the point where you feel weightless
(other than when it goes into a controlled dive) ?

From what I heard the Virgin/SpaceShipTwo will go higher than the
SpaceShipOne, and you will get several minutes of weighlessness for your
$200,000