Tourist trips in space could be only in a few months | Economy

Virgin Galactic founded by billionaire Richard Branson, and Blue Origin the creator of Amazon Jeff Bezos, compete, using entirely different technologies, to complete their tests and become the first business

Moments of Weightlessness

Neither the passengers of the Virgin nor the blue passengers will go into orbit around the Earth, and their experience in weightlessness will only last a few minutes. It's a very different experience than the first space tourists, who paid tens of millions of dollars to get to the International Space Station (ISS) in the 2000s.

After having paid a lot of cheaper tickets – US $ 250,000 to Virgin and we still do not know how much in Blue Origin -, these new space tourists will enter dozens of kilometers into the atmosphere before coming back on Earth. For reference, the ISS is in orbit about 400 km from our planet.

The goal is to cross this imaginary line where space begins, whether it is the Karman line, 100 km from the surface of the Earth, or the border recognized by the army of the world. American air, 80 km away.

] Virgin Galactic

In the case of Virgin Galactic, six passengers and two pilots is the capacity of the VSS, which has the appearance of a private jet.

This unit will be coupled with another spacecraft that accompanies it in its initial route – the WhiteKnightTwo – from which it is separated at a height of about 15 km. Once separated, the VSS starts its propeller and continues on its way.

Then the passengers will float in an environment of weightlessness for a few minutes before returning to Land .

The descent is smoothed by a system that makes the tail of the ship move in a kind of bow before returning to its normal position, start planning and end up landing at the Virgin spaceport in the New Desert. Mexico.

The trip lasts between one and a half and two hours. During a test conducted May 29 on the Mojave Desert, the satellite reached a height of 34 kilometers.

In October 2014, a Virgin ship broke down during the flight due to a pilot error and one of the two pilots on board died. The tests were then restarted with another ship.

The company has reached an agreement for the opening of a second spaceport at the airport of Taranto-Grottaglie, in southern Italy.

Branson said in May on a BBC program that he hopes himself to be one of the first passengers in the next 12 months. 650 people are already on the waiting list for this trip, according to Virgin.

Blue Origin

For its part, Blue Origin uses a technology that looks more like the traditional rocket : the New Shepard.

On this ship, six passengers board a capsule inserted on the tip of an 18-meter rocket. After launch, this capsule separates from the rocket and continues its trajectory for several kilometers. During a test on April 29, the capsule exceeded a hundred kilometers.

After a few minutes of weightlessness, during which passengers can see outside through large windows, the capsule gradually returns to the Earth assisted in its descent by three large parachutes and retro-reflectors. propellers that slow down the fall.

From take-off to landing, the flight lasted about ten minutes.

Up until now, in the tests, only dolls have been used, but one of the company's directors, Rob Meyerson, said that "soon" will start doing tests with the humans.

Another Blue Origin executive, Yu Matsutomi, told a conference Wednesday that the first tests with humans will take place "at the end of this year," according to Space News.

And what happens next?

SpaceX and Boeing develop their own capsules to transport NASA astronauts which is expected to be ready in 2020 after a few delays. This is a major investment that will be partially funded by offering private flights.

"If you plan to travel in space, you will have four times the number of options you had before," said Phil Larson, Dean of the School of Engineering from the University of Colorado.

In the long term, the Russian company that manufactures rockets Soyuz is studying the possibility of taking tourists to the ISS. And an American company called Orion Span announced earlier this year that it hoped to put into orbit a luxury space hotel in a few years, even though the project is in its infancy.