Planet Space has this nice little video on Fox about their plans to start a suborbital transportation company that can move people between Chicago and Japan in 40 minutes.

PlanetSpace, a company that is competing for NASA contracts to re-supply the International Space Station is looking to use is orbital craft for suborbital point to point travel. This means that a trip from New York to Paris could conceivably take 20 minutes. They claim that the silver dart will be able to achieve this by gliding over 25,000 miles at hypersonic speeds.

Transformational Space Corp and PlanetSpace received a promise for continued consultations, advise, and feedback from NASA regarding their development of spacecraft capable of delivering cargo and crew to the International Space Station. The promise stems for the COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) competition previously sponsored by NASA. SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler were awarded $500 million from that competition in order to pursue their own designs for spacecraft. The COTS competition will be re-opened in 2010, which may give Transformational Space Corp (t/Space) and PlanetSpace a chance to get contracts for re-supplying the space station. It is estimated that those contracts will be lucrative to the tune of several billion dollars.