Both vehicles leave the same pad, but they are solving completely different problems. The Kármán line at 100 km is just an altitude marker — the internationally recognised edge of "space". Crossing it briefly costs relatively little vertical Δv.
A suborbital hop only needs enough vertical velocity (~1.4–1.6 km/s) to coast up past that line on a ballistic arc, like a ball thrown straight up — then gravity pulls it straight back down. Total flight time is 10–15 minutes, with a few minutes of true weightlessness at the top of the arc.
A stable orbit is not about altitude at all — it's about going sideways fast enough that the ground curves away beneath you as fast as you fall toward it. That requires roughly 7.8 km/s of horizontal velocity, more than 5× the suborbital vehicle's speed. Because rocket propellant scales exponentially with required Δv (the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation), even a modest velocity gap translates into a dramatically larger vehicle, more engines, and far more propellant per passenger — which is why orbital tickets cost roughly one to two orders of magnitude more than suborbital ones, but reward passengers with days of weightlessness instead of minutes.
- Suborbital arc — straight up, brief weightlessness near apogee, straight back down to the pad.
- Orbital path — curves into a closed loop around Earth that never comes down on its own; weightlessness lasts the entire time in orbit.
- Δv — the total velocity change a vehicle's engines must provide; it is the single number that drives propellant mass, vehicle size and ultimately ticket price.