Current space-hops just can't be anything more than a tourist attraction. Looking at the design it seems the ship is unable to do atmospheric entry from orbit and is a dead end as far as research is concerned.
There's plenty of research to be done in a suborbital flight regime, both standard sounding rocket stuff and new types that can benefit from either more room onboard or even from a human operator, or simply enabled by lower costs and greater availability and/or frequency.
Lots of it may be testing things out destined for eventual orbital use. In a suborbital flight you can get many minutes of freefall, which beats the seconds available on parabolic flights (which are used for lots of the same experiments now.)
NASA has a whole program for collecting experiments for suborbital flights, and Masten in particular is focused on research uses.
I shouldn't be surprised if they fly a lot of potential orbital-flight candidates on suborbital just to get them used to freefall.
Suborbital may not be a good as orbital, but it's much much cheaper, and cheapness has a quality all its own.
If the Skylon manages to get built to spec and gets ~30 people into orbit for $10 million per launch, then an eighth of the worldwide tourist budget could launch a million people a year. Though, presumably if you were launching that many people, the cost would actually be a fair bit less.
