Originally Posted by
ShotOne
You can quibble over the exact figure all day but the delay is far more than ten minutes. The fact is, closing airspace unnecessarily costs a great deal of money; as Scott says, why do it for longer than necessary?
If the flights are passenger carrying reusable launch vehicles they should be safe enough to not need vast 'debris field' restricted airspace. The deorbit is planned well in advance or for hypersonics known well in advance so there is no need to close airspace down hours before. These are all procedures developed for the Space Shuttle which was designed to a far lower reliability/safety requirement than a commercial passenger carrying craft. It seems that rather than enforce the habitual and well known restricted airspace some work should be done based on the actual risks of each launch. That could considerably reduce the interference with normal routine flights.