Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.
Beyond that, it's got to be the lousiest way to spend a couple days. Weightlessness is really uncomfortable -- you're most likely going to be motion sick for a day or two. But beyond that your body requires gravity for proper distribution of fluids. The reason astronauts look so puffy in photographs is their faces are swelling from excess fluid.
I can only assume "too easy to track" is part of the logic.
Ditto for kinetic strikes. That was super hyped up.
There is zero merit and zero gain from lobbing pole sized object at terrestrial targets, and I blame people having negative understanding of orbital dynamics for the whole concept getting popular in the first place.
Problems are:
1) You pay every single Joule of impact energy (and more!) in rocket fuel for getting the thing up there in the first place, which is an abysmal deal.
2) You can't actually "drop" anything from orbit once its there, you have to accelerate it while being trivially observable (and trackable) from earth by 30 year old radar technology.
3) You could literally do the same thing by launching purely kinetic ballistic missiles at targets. Non one ever does that for a reason-- its difficult, expensive and ineffective at the same time. Basically the only benefit is demonstrating that you could have delivered an actual nuclear payload in the same way.
Yeah, that's why it'd be a good way for SpaceX to make money.
Dropping steel rods from orbit didn't seem so crazy. But I've never seen a detailed evaluation of the idea.
IDK I think plenty of people will want to go to space or even cut 24 hour flights across the world to 90 minutes.
As for experience - it's going to be pricy, but look how many multi-million dollar yachts are out there, parked, doing nothing. People do have money for such experiences.
Sonic boom can't be the limiting factor forever.
They didn't even demonstrate performance on par with their 1950s era T-38 chase plane, and now they've retired their 'demonstrator' and pivoted into data centre power turbines.