If everything goes according to plan (I know, that's a big if), then Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and others like John Carmack's space company will be doing literally thousands of suborbital flights in the next 5 years or so. Not just tourist flights, but tons of science missions as well. Taking a step towards someone being able bail from those kind of flights is definitely useful. Very unlikely that this would be used for orbital launch anytime soon, it's way safer to abort an orbital launch in the capsule than to try and eject.
The military has also looked at using suborbital rockets to transport special forces hundreds of miles in a few minutes, then deploy them high over a hotspot quickly. So it could conceivably be useful for those purposes as well. (To be clear, these are just forward-looking conceptual studies. I'm not saying the military has these vehicles ready to go or anything like that).
Lastly, these guys are innovating on spacesuits design, which has been badly needed. Only a handful of spacesuit designs have ever been built and actually used in practice, and they were built by government entities. We're talking the slowest, most ponderous development cycles imaginable. NASA is still essentially using the same spacesuits on the space station that they first used with the shuttle in the early 1980's. Think about how many gains we've made in materials since then. The more suits we can build, test in the wild, and iterate on the better.
The military has also looked at using suborbital rockets to transport special forces hundreds of miles in a few minutes, then deploy them high over a hotspot quickly. So it could conceivably be useful for those purposes as well. (To be clear, these are just forward-looking conceptual studies. I'm not saying the military has these vehicles ready to go or anything like that).
Lastly, these guys are innovating on spacesuits design, which has been badly needed. Only a handful of spacesuit designs have ever been built and actually used in practice, and they were built by government entities. We're talking the slowest, most ponderous development cycles imaginable. NASA is still essentially using the same spacesuits on the space station that they first used with the shuttle in the early 1980's. Think about how many gains we've made in materials since then. The more suits we can build, test in the wild, and iterate on the better.