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Scientists, Not Just Tourists, Are Getting Tickets to Ride Into Suborbital Space
"Science, perhaps even more than tourism (free reg. may be required to read), could turn out to be big business for Virgin Galactic and other companies that are aiming to provide short rides above the 62-mile altitude that marks the official entry into outer space, eventually on a daily basis."
Virgin is looking at ticket prices in the $200,000 range, which is peanuts compared to the millions some scientific space expeditions can cost, even for brief experiments. And if you don't even have *that* much in your research budget, John Carmack has been touting $105,000 space flights for nearly a year now, and Xcor Aerospace has been taking $95,000 space ride reservations since 2008. It looks like the biggest customer for short space flights for scientific experiments so far is the Southwest Research Institute, but many others are lining up, especially since, the article quotes one scientist as saying, “It’s almost impossible to get research on the space station at the moment." Of course, none of these commercial space ventures has actually carried any paying passengers into space yet, but it's only a matter of time before some of them do.
When the experiments will get to space has not been set. Neither company has yet announced when commercial flights will begin, but eventually SpaceShipTwo could fly once or twice a day, and the Lynx is designed for up to four flights a day.
Until they get some solid dates attached to those flights, this kind of thing remains in the realm of wishful thinking. But I wish them all the best.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Is there a $25 baggage check fee?
Five minutes is plenty of time for me, even including foreplay and a couple minutes of cuddling afterwards...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Plenty of experiments rely on microgravity -- as an aerospace engineer most of my experience has been in testing devices for use in space, but I know theres a lot of biology and materials work done as well.
There is certainly a market. Consider that Zero G Corp and the old Vomet Comet got plenty of research done, and there you were stuck with less than a minute of microgravity at a time. Suborbital flights are a midpoint between parabolic flights and orbital flight both in terms of cost and time.
Also, I know that another point of research that there's a lot of interest in isn't so much for the microgravity environment, but that the vehicles are travelling through the least understood parts of the atmosphere. This provides a great opportunity to learn about the upper atmosphere.
Out of curiosity (and no I'm not trying to be snarky but actually curious) what sorts of experiments are people looking to carry out in 5 minutes of free fall? Doesn't seem like a lot of time.
How much time do you really for Zero-G sex, porn to make millions and promote Zero-G experimentation? Imagination is as limitless as space itself.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I don't have much idea myself, but there are some metallurgy applications. You can make some alloys out of otherwise immiscible metals. Melt them on the ground, stir quickly at the start of the free fall period and quench the mix.
There's also some composite materials that consist of a metal and gaseous component. For example, you might have some sort of hollow beads with a metal binder. The radical density differences make this a hard material to build in normal Earth environment. Or you might be trying to make a solid metallic foam.
Another zero gee favorite is large protein crystals (for crystallography). The five minute period might be enough to create fairly large and relatively flawless crystals in some cases.
There's one final reason even when zero gee processes take much longer than five minutes. It's a cheap way to test the equipment before you put it in a really expensive environment.
For example, if you have a kit for making proteins in a week, it would suck to put that on the ISS and find out that you have a horde of technical problems that need to worked out by very expensive astronauts. Even five minutes is enough to get the gear running and find problems that manifest quickly.
Two other choices are planes flying parabolic trajectories (NASA's "Vomit Comet" gives about 25 seconds of free fall, for example) and dropping stuff on the Earth (which gives a few seconds).
I think it would be a useful duration/price point for free fall experiments.
Virgin's the furthest ahead here, and has a small fleet of Scaled Composite's SpaceShipTwo currently in testing. It's an aircraft-launched rocket plane, derivative of the Boeing X-20. The earlier SpaceShipOne was derivative of the Bell X-15.
Max altitudes:
- SS2: 110km (est.)
- SS1: 112km
- X-15: 108km
- X-20: 160km (est.)
- Silbervogel: 145km (est.) (WWII German design the X-20 is derived from)
- Me-263 Komet: 14km (WWII German fighter the X-15 is derived from)
(Yes, the "Sputnik moment" of using German technology strikes again)
The ISS is parked at about 186km.
The rocket plane design is cheap, but I'm not sure it's possible to actually get the necessary altitude with it. I don't know if the X-20 would've gotten that altitude or not, but Scaled Composite's estimate of 110km seems more sane given their design carries 7 more people than the X-20.
The ISS's problem isn't the cost involved in getting to it as the Soyuz is pretty cheap -- which is $45k per seat to NASA, or $20k/seat to space tourists -- it's that the number of personnel is limited by the escape spacecraft, which has been a single Soyuz capsule, so there can only be three astronauts there at any one time. NASA was supposed to have made an escape shuttle that would hold more for the ISS, but Congress canceled the funding before it could be completed.
I don't know that these designs are actually that practical for much as they don't achieve low-earth orbit. But if nothing else, it goes to show that Germany had some damn fine rocket engineers in the 1940s.