2010, a space oddity: Virgin Galactic has so far sold three hundred seats for four weightless minutes. Will the trajectory be worth $200,000 a ticket? Clive Irving reports on the Space Ship Enterprise
You're at a height of 50,000 feet, with only about 15 percent of the earth's atmosphere left above you, and the view below is already of a spherical horizon framing a large stretch of the California coast and the eastern Pacific. Yet this is relatively tame, not what you have paid $200,000 for. There is a sudden, short drop as the Space Ship Enterprise cuts loose from its mother ship. Wait for it. Brace for the hottest ride you'll ever know. The rocket motor kicks in—you've watched those NASA launches from Cape Kennedy, heard the taciturn voices of astronauts as they sit on top of a ball of fire and accelerate toward the moon. Your heart is racing. Within seconds you will know what it feels like to have a rocket right there up your backside. The ship is going from 173 miles per hour to 2,600 miles per hour in about 90 seconds. That means your body is in the grip of 3.5 g's—gravity multiplied, it's three and a half times your normal weight as the ship heads straight up. Test pilots call this "eyeballs in."
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And the wildest part is yet to come.
Sometime in 2012, if all goes according to plan (a big if), this is what it will feel like to have a seat on the world's first space tourism excursion, provided by Virgin Galactic. About 500 people have flown into space since a 27-year-old Russian air force lieutenant named Yuri Gagarin left the earth at 9:07 a.m. Moscow time on April 12, 1961. Richard Branson, the entrepreneur behind Virgin Galactic, aims to put as many as 700 people into space in the program's first year of commercial operation.
As you can see from "Space Virgins", SpaceShipTwo, newly renamed the Enterprise, will reach a height of 360,000 feet, or 68 miles—that's ten times as high as a regular airliner cruises—and the six passengers will get a view, through 17-inch-wide portholes, that will stretch from the Pacific coast of Mexico all the way to Oregon.
But can this really be called space tourism? You're not even approaching Gagarin territory. In orbit, his tiny eight-foot-diameter capsule reached a height of 203 miles. The Virgin Galactic Enterprise is more ballistic than galactic. To make it into low earth orbit, you need to be traveling at 17,500 miles per hour—that's what it takes to break free of gravity—and the Enterprise travels at 3,000 miles per hour max. The Galactic trip is really four things in one: an airplane cruise to altitude, a rocket ride like a missile, a period of about four minutes of weightlessness followed by a rapid fall to reentry into the earth's atmosphere, and then a long glide. As serious space travel, it's foreplay . . . but very seductive foreplay. Approximately 300 people have already committed their $200,000 for a seat, and Will Whitehorn, Galactic's president, expects that to double by the time the ship is ready to take customers.
In defense of its vocabulary, Virgin can cite what is called the Kármán Line, named for the scientist who, in the 1950s, decreed that space began just beyond 62 miles above the ground. The U.S. Air Force ruled that any pilot who ventured above 50 miles high could be called an astronaut. By this measure, Galactic passengers will get their astronaut wings. However, remember that NASA astronauts go through years of training—physical and scientific—to qualify. One of Galactic's several leaps is to insist that any reasonably fit person can, with careful prepping, be ready for the rocket ride. The cabin of the Enterprise is, says Whitehorn, basically a "shirt sleeve" environment: Although his Web site has a video with passengers wearing what seem to be designer space suits and helmets, in reality it will be sweat suits and no helmets.
Branson's endeavor is a landmark in the privatization of space technology. When NASA began its space program, the cost was way beyond the means of Croesus. These days, when a regular laptop has thousands of times the power of the computers on the Apollo moon shots, the science is far more accessible and space itself is open to the competition of entrepreneurs like Branson and Jeff Bezos, the Amazon mogul who is also working on a suborbital vehicle.
Branson, however, is only one half of the Galactic act. The other half is the designer of the ships, Burt Rutan. These days, when few airplanes have one man's signature on them, Rutan's originality and individualism have been evident in every detail of the program, from the pioneering SpaceShipOne, winner of the 2004 Ansari X Prize for the first vehicle to put three people into space twice in two weeks in a reusable spacecraft. WhiteKnightTwo, the Enterprise's mother ship, is crafted from the composite materials Rutan has spent years developing, which combine strength with very light weight; it looks oddly elongated because it has wings designed to provide lift in the thin air of extremely high altitudes (with different engines, it could reach 80,000 feet). Apart from its role as launcher for the Enterprise, WhiteKnightTwo will be used for scientific work possible only at those rarefied heights.
Can space tourism really be expressed in a trip that basically finishes up where it begins? Well, in some respects the trip truly is far out. The physics of that first wham in the back from the rocket is probably the better understood part of the ride. Returning to earth involves an experience that only Rutan's test pilots on SpaceShipOne can so far describe. As the Enterprise leaves the weightless phase, it really picks up speed because it's falling uninhibited through space as a rock would. Here, the passengers will feel a force as high as 6.5 g's—as if they weighed six and a half times their normal weight.
As the graphic shows, the ship will descend, "feathered" like a shuttlecock, but with its nose up and its belly taking all the friction of the fall. The Enterprise, with its 12-foot-long cabin, is three times the size of SpaceShipOne. It also has significant changes in the way it is configured. The test program, about to begin, will involve performing maneuvers never before done. Branson says that safety is a key issue: "We'll not be sending anyone into space before it is safe and the vehicle is well and truly tested."
As SpaceShipOne neared reentry on a test flight, the pilot called base to say that he thought he had a problem. There was a strange pinging sound all over the ship's skin. In fact, nothing was amiss. Because Rutan's design is so aerodynamically clean, and because there are no mechanical sounds to be heard in the cabin, the environment is weirdly silent. Silent enough for the first layer of atmospheric atoms to create their own song of wonder as they danced on the skin.
COMMENTARY:��The idea of regular passengers rocketing into space is no longer science fiction, but quickly becoming reality.�� Richard Branson, the visionary billionaire entrepreneur, founder of Virgin Atlantic Airlines and a hundred other companies, stands at the forefront of something truly amazing and technologically monumental.
It is hard to believe that�normal human beings, albeit, rich human beings, are willing to forkup $200,000�to be blasted 62 miles�into space and experience four minutes of weightlessness.��If you do the man, this works out to $50,000 per minute or $833.33 per second.� ��
I remember�Stanley Kubrick's�amazing science fiction�film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and seeing�a Pan American Airlines (went bankrupt and no longer exists)�passenger ship shuttle a U.S. space scientist to the moon.��At that moment in time,�my initial reaction to the idea of ferrying�regular�paying passengers into space, seem too incredible, and stretching things a bit.� Fast forward to 2010, and it looks like science fiction will become reality.
Courtesy of an article�appearing in the March issue of Conde Naste Traveler Magazine��
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