Bootstrapping Hawaii

It could be argued that sub-orbital will be the one to
flourish because it will find more markets than just tourism. Given
enough time it may become the dominant form for long range travel,
pakage delivery and if so then it will probably have more R&D
invested in it which will lead to more advances, and so forth.

Doesn't that make sense?
Probably not. It turns out you need a pretty big rocket (e.g. an ICBM) to go more a thousand or so miles- in fact most orbital vehicles are simply ICBMs with a bit less payload and a reprogramed guidance system. And rockets that go a few thousand miles use much more fuel than aeroplanes do, so cost very much more. So, just like Concorde, the hi tech gets undercut. Most things don't need to get there that quickly. Oh yeah, and sub-orbitals cause sonic booms too (mainly at takeoff and landing though).
So my point
stands: the tourist market requires more stringent safety
requirements than a professional astronaut environment, or for that
matter, an adventure market. The technology of reliability, as far
as I know, and counter to your assertion, doesn't exist that could
render spaceflight reliable for the general tourist market.
I don't agree. I do personally know some people that have built a liquid fuelled rocket engine and lit it several thousand times. It has never exploded.
Yes, I've read that. Now I ask you to look to the future and
extrapolate some trends. If the tourist aspect of sub-orbital grows
and the price points come down, do you honestly think that the FAA
is not going to want to tighten up requirements? I think they're cutting some slack to the suborbital market now
because it is so fringe. If it comes closer to mainstream, then I
personally can't see how they couldlet it continue, especially if
there are a few accidents.
Yup, that's right.
This whole line of questioning stems from your assertion that the
technology exists that makes orbital tourism possible. I disagree.
It's called Soyuz right now. The price of Soyuz can and will drop as the launch rate goes up. I'm expecting/hoping for competition to back this up.
As for the other tourist industries, they don't come under the
authority of certification agencies. They don't involve technology,
maintenance and procedures that could be made more stringent.
They're a different animal. Acts of nature that kill tourists are
different than acts of negligence that could have been prevented by
FAA oversight. I tend to think that the FAA might be sensitive to
that charge after a sub-orbital tragedy. Don't you?
Probably. We shall see. It wasn't such a big issue back early in the last century when quite a few people died; although it did mean that the FAA did eventually become as careful as it is. The point is that they didn't do that clamp down until there was a serious chance of passenger flights becoming big business. We're not there in space tourism- we're more at the barnstorming end of the spectrum.

And there's a subtle point about the FAA you've apparently missed- the FAA is on the side of the industry- not the public. They only push reliability for airlines because unreliability is seen as bad for that industry. Pushing reliability to a ridiculous degree in the suborbital industry is bad for the industry right now, so they aren't doing it. I've been to lectures by the relevant section of the FAA, and that's really how they look at it.
Orbital tourism has potential to satisfy a market and to push rocket
technology. This I do not doubt. I'm not arguing against the
potential. I just don't see it as adding to the bootstrapping
effort. If you delve more deeply into how orbital tourism causes
orbital infrastructure that is conducive to bootstrapping efforts i
think you'll find that one can only make a tenuous case, not a
reliable one. The technology is very much dual use. It's a bit like arguing that military aeroplanes don't help out civil aeroplane technology. But the 747 was derived from a military jet. Similarly tourist vehicles are a way of launch colonists; and the associated freight can carry settlement stuff just as much as hotel related equipment.
The suppositions that are required to be accepted are too large We shall see.
What is too expensive for one private enterprise project to fund,
NASA and ESA could, and leave the other stuff to private operators. I don't know about ESA, but the experience of companies with NASA has shown that the strings attached to launch-infrastructure related projects constrain them along lines that don't lead anywhere particularly useful.
TangoMan