Human Spaceflights - Space tourism and time travel is a reality

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Human Spaceflights - Space tourism and time travel just may be a reality

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On the same day the space shuttle Endeavour safely glided to Earth for a landing yesterday, the milestone NASA flight also marked a landmark press-release announcement from XCOR Aerospace that is 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 Concorde supersonic tourist aircarrier that had potential for sub-orbital travel, the XCOR model always focused on the weightless zone of our outer 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 Concorde jet flew more than twice the speed of sound and about 20 kilometers above the ground. From that altitude, one could see the curvature of the Earth's surface, it also meant you could coast from London to New York in just about 3 hours! The Concorde thus flew faster than the rotation of the Earth and, in a way, it was a time machine: if the Concorde plane left London at 10:30 am it arrived in New York at 9:30 am the same day! Seemingly traveling back in time while the passengers experienced a three hour sonic flight. 

One of the greatest aviation achievements of the original Concorde design, that the mechanical engineers had to overcome, was the immense heat problems; the air was compressed so much that the body of the plane overheated: the passenger windows would become very hot to the touch and the front of the nose reached well above the boiling point with opposing exterior subzero temperatures. This process may have caused expansion pressure on the plane cabin or the wings that cooled the body of the plane. In the year 2000 an Air France Concorde flying to New York crash landed 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 Concordes' wings. In addition to these grounding challenges, 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. The rocket engine was designed to improve on some of these engineering challenges.  The engine prompted the creation of the XCOR spacecraft named Lynx; a rocket ship type plane capable of sub-orbital flight to altitudes more than 60 kilometers above the ground (3 times higher than the sonic Concorde).

By definition, to 'reach space',  this rocket engine has to lift the sub-orbital craft to a spaceflight altitude higher than 100 kilometers above 'sea level' (source: www.space-travel.com).

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 coast up to the highest point.  Those few minutes from where the engines shut off to the point where it begins a slow downward acceleration is when the passengers would experience true 'weightlessness.'

(see YouTube XCOR Video Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a-l1tb1rPg)

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. I believe the promise of a safe, affordable sub-orbital spaceflight is just around the corner and it will mark a new golden age in spaceflight aviation as well as in commercial flights.

The XCOR Lynx being launched in Mojave California today; the spacecraft is expected to be scheduling regular flights by 2010.

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Pic #1 - XCOR Lynx graphic photo credit; colored and edited by Tomitheos

Pic #2 - Tomitheos Painting of the Earth; Led light composition and photo by Tomitheos

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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. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-orbital_spaceflight)

In my research, 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. (source: www.space.com)                                        

No doubt a huge impact on the NASA agency! 

Tomitheos' Recommended Read: HyperSpace - A Scientific Odyssey by Michio Kaku

Visit Space Talk with Tomitheos at:

http://tomitheos.blogspot.com