"The kicker is to find an application for space flight that is near term, yet profitable enough to bootstrap into the heavier applications like power satellites and asteroid resources. I personally think tourism has potential here. I had been hoping back in the Skylab, early Shuttle and Mir days that someone would find a highly profitable product that could only be manufactured in space, but nothing along those lines has shown up yet. "

I think the biggest value of sub-orbital tourism, is the potential reform of the laws restricting this type activity, and the establish of laws which will give some degree of certainty for potential investors.
The reason we can't get into space is the restriction on launching anything into space, and landing on Earth from space is another but less important aspect- there are laws regarding this but they need to be tested.
The day when you can know how much it will cost to launch & and the ability to get permission for a space launch in say less than a month will be the day we will have opened the space frontier.
Sub-orbital travel will be a big market. Being able to get anywhere in the world in "about an hour" has value. First, it will be an adventure type travel, next it will be travelers or packages that need to get somewhere quickly and will pay the high price, then it will be First Class type travel- the Concorde type market, next it will be competitive with business Jets and conventional airliners for some destinations.
It will probably take decades before the family takes sub-orbital rocket to a vacation destination; before this we will be mining the Moon and NEOs. First market for space electrical power will be in Space itself, when prices drop lower enough then Earth surface will become a market- that will also take decades.
But before any of this can begin, we need the licence to launch.