After Boris's failed vanity Garden Bridge project which has now been scrapped having cost a huge amount of money do you now not believe in bridges? Or gardens?
When I were a lad it was all "we'll have flying cars by the year 2000". Some problems are just hard and expensive to solve.
Why are we not all zooming across the Atlantic faster than Concorde now? Because propulsion is costly. So aircraft have improved in other ways, notably comfort and entertainment options.
This is a hard problem to solve, making space travel accessible to the average Joe. It's disappointing we're not there yet, even Virgin Galactic if it ever gets off the ground won't do it, it will be for the super rich. But projects being delayed and problems being more complicated than anticipated doesn't imply anything "going on", necessarily.
When they said "flying cars" ... that was 50 years earlier ... not 3 years. When you say you will do something in 3 years that suggests you are using known technologies ... not inventing new ones.
Branson is actually trying to do something relatively simply. Fly to an altitude of 100km. This is a slight of hand suggesting that space starts at 100km because of the Karman Line definition. Which frankly is a very stupid definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line
This in itself would sound like a challenge (get an aircraft above 100km), if it hadn't already been done some 50 years earlier by NASA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15All Branson is trying to do is make an 8 seat x-15. Big whoop. He even does it the exact same way ... drop from a large airliner and use a rocket to boost to over 100km.
However, how serious is he?
Well to buy a small off-the shelf passenger aircraft like an Airbus a320 costs about $80m. But Branson owns a spaceship! Wow. That sounds super expensive.
Oh wait. Total Current Assets = £5.9m.
https://companycheck.co.uk/company/05802809/VIRGIN-GALACTIC-LIMITED/companies-house-dataBut you own a spaceship, right? What about your launch pad in the Mojave Desert? The aircraft that drops the spaceship - White Knight? The buildings, the merch store? How can all these things be worth less than £6m?
... unless of course none of these things are actually what you say they are. If in fact they are cheap mock ups and Virgin Galactic is no more than a marketing tool for Virgin Atlantic. But wait, who in their right mind would want to promise people spaceships to boost the brand perception of their airline?
Virgin Galactic is a very old marketing gimmick to give a dull airline a halo effect. Never has Branson had any intention of flying anyone into 'space' ever. It is like pinning your hopes on a company being able to train Meerkats to talk.