A suborbital flight reaches space but not orbit: the vehicle climbs above the atmosphere — often past the 100 km Kármán line — then falls back without completing a revolution. Needing only about an eighth of orbital speed, it costs dramatically less than reaching orbit.
Understanding Suborbital Flight
Why orbit is 60 times harder
Reaching 100 km altitude takes modest energy; staying there takes speed. The kinetic energy of orbital velocity (7.8 km/s) is over sixty times that of a 1 km/s suborbital hop, and shedding that energy again on the way home is what makes orbital re-entry violent — plasma heating, ablative shields — while a suborbital capsule descends gently under parachutes after a comparatively benign fall. This energy gap, not altitude, is the real boundary between suborbital tourism and orbital spaceflight.
Who flies suborbital
Blue Origin's New Shepard flies paying passengers and research payloads on ~11-minute flights from West Texas, with the booster landing propulsively and the capsule under parachutes. Virgin Galactic's air-launched spaceplane follows a different profile to a similar apogee. Uncrewed, sounding rockets have flown suborbital science for decades — and any intercontinental ballistic missile is, by definition, a suborbital vehicle, which is why early crewed "space shots" like Alan Shepard's 1961 Freedom 7 flight rode converted missiles.