Truemors
Photography Graphics by Tomitheos©
On the same day the space shuttle Endeavour safely glided to Earth yesterday for a landing, the milestone flight also marked a landmark announcement from XCOR Aerospace promising tourist spaceflights in the very near future. XCOR is a private California based rocket engine and spaceflight development company headed by Jeff Greason. Unlike the famed Concord tourist aircarrier that had potential for for sub-orbital travel the XCOR model always focused on the the weightless zone of our atmosphere. This altitude, also known as the Karman line is the point where the atmosphere is thin and where a vehicle can fly fast enough to support itself with aerodynamic lift from the Earth's atmosphere. The Concord flew more than twice the speed of sound 18 kilometers above the ground and from there one could see the curvature of the Earth's surface and meant you could travel from Paris or London to New York in just about 3 hours. The Concord thus flew faster than the rotation of the Earth and in a way was a time machine: if a plane left London at 10:30 a.m. it will arrive in New York at 9:30 a.m. the same day seemingly traveling back in time while the passengers experienced a 3 hour sonic flight.
One of the greatest aviation achievements of the original Concord design that the mechanical engineers had to overcome was the immense heat problems; the air was compressed so much the body of the plane overheated where the front of the nose reached 127 Celsius- well above the boiling point with exterior subzero temperatures. This process caused expansion of the plane cabin, the wings cooled the body of the plane. On March 25 of 2000 an Air France Concorde flying to New York crashed outside Paris shortly after take-off killing 113 people on board and four people on the ground. One day earlier Air france disclosed having found cracks in four of its six Concorde's wings. The Concorde could only travel supersonically over water, the sonic boom over land was too disruptive and a technical problem engineers could not overcome.
XCOR Aerospace began test firing a fairly new jet design concept, the Methane Rocket Engine to overcome some of the engineering challenges. This XCOR spacecraft named <i>Lynx</i> is a rocket ship type plane capable of sub-orbital flight to altitudes more than 60 kilometers above the ground.
By definition this rocket engine is to lift the sub-orbital craft to a spaceflight altitude higher than 100 kilometers above sea level.
Sub-orbital tourist flights will initially focus on attaining the altitude required to qualify as 'reaching space.' The take-off flight will be a highly juiced g-force ride, either vertical or very steep and landing very much like a plane or shuttle. The spacecraft will probably shut off its engines well before reaching maximum altitude and then coasting up to its highest point. Those few minutes from where the engines shut off to the point where the atmosphere begins to slow down the downward acceleration, the passengers will experience true 'weightlessness.'
With companies like Space Adventures and Suborbital Corporation offering carrier planes with sub-orbital spaceflights, the project financed by unnamed American investors, indicates an obvious change
in aviation over the last few years and one thing is for sure: the promise of an affordable sub-orbital spaceflight is just around the corner and it will mark a new golden age in spaceflight.
The XCOR Lynx being launched in Mojave California today; the spacecrft is expected to be scheduling regular flights by 2010.
---------------------------------------------------Sub-orbital flight is a spaceflight in which a spacecraft reaches space but its trajectory intersects the atmosphere or surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched so that it does not complete one orbital revolution.
The invention of the Concorde plane still ranks alongside the Wright Flyer and Apollo 11 and was a huge step in aviation development.
The Endeavour returned to Earth yesterday with the delivery of the first part of its research laboratory. The milestone flight fully integrated Japan into the international Space Station partnership; on the same day two top ranking NASA scientists decided to leave their posts: science official Alan Stern and John Mather, the agency's Nobel-prize-winning chief assistant. No doubt a huge impact to the NASA agency.
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