SpaceX aims to launch up to 4 tourists into super high orbit

SpaceX aims to launch up to 4 tourists into super high orbit


CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX aims to launch up to four tourists into a super high orbit, possibly by the end of next year.
The private company is working with Space Adventures Inc. for the flight, officials announced Tuesday. Ticket prices are not being divulged but expected to be in the millions.
Space Adventures already has helped put tourists into orbit with trips to the International Space Station, working with the Russian space program.
For this trip, paying customers will skip the space station and instead orbit two to three times higher, or roughly 500 miles to 750 miles (800 kilometers to 1,200 kilometers) above Earth.
It's a lofty goal that would approach the record 850-mile-high (1,370 kilometers) orbit achieved by Gemini 11's Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon in 1966.
The tourist flight “will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement.
Elon Musk's California-based SpaceX already is dabbling in space tourism, signing on a Japanese billionaire to fly to the moon in three or so years. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic also plan tourist trips to space, but these will be brief up-and-downs, not orbital.
SpaceX will use the same kind of Dragon capsule that will launch NASA astronauts to the space station, possibly in another few months. The capsule has flown only once in space so far, making its debut last year in a successful test flight without a crew.
Space Adventures spokeswoman Stacey Tearne said the tourist flight could occur in the last quarter of 2021. The company is in discussions with “several potential clients.”
No professional pilot or astronaut will be required, Tearne said, because the Dragon is fully autonomous. But passengers will be able to control the spacecraft if required, she said in an email.
The cost will be in line with previous tourist flights, she said. Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte, founder of Cirque du Soleil, paid $35 million for a 1 1/2-week space station flight in 2009. He said from orbit that it was “worth every penny and more.”
Like all previous space tourists, he launched on a Russian rocket from Kazakhstan.
This private Dragon flight from Cape Canaveral will be shorter, lasting up to five days, according to Tearne.
Based in Vienna, Virginia, Space Adventures helped arrange the flight of the world's first space tourist, Dennis Tito, founder and chairman of Wilshire Associates in California. He flew to the space station on a Russian capsule in 2001, igniting the wrath of top NASA officials who opposed visiting tourists.
The company has arranged eight space missions, with one tourist going twice.
Space Adventures' goal is to create “unique and previously impossible opportunities for private citizens to experience space,” Eric Anderson, company chairman, said in a statement.
NASA has softened its stance on space tourists, and is opening the station doors to paying customers once commercial crew flights by SpaceX and Boeing have been established.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon

Image
You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earth’s surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune,  The Anchorage Daily News  reported on Sunday. The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium. Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey. Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will ...
Read more

Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies

Image
Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies WASHINGTON — The NASA Advisory Council has recommended that NASA review its existing planetary protection guidelines to balance the needs of science and exploration, an effort that could set the stage for a similar revision at the international level. The council, during a two-day meeting at NASA Headquarters Dec. 10–11, adopted a recommendation calling on NASA to establish an interdisciplinary committee of experts to review the agency’s current requirements for preventing contamination of other worlds by NASA spacecraft as well as any contamination of the Earth by materials brought back from those worlds. “NASA should establish a multidisciplinary task force of experts from industry, the scientific community, and relevant government agencies, to develop U.S. policies that properly balance the legitimate need to protect against the harmful contamination of the Earth or other celestial bodies with the scientific, social, and e...
Read more

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought Jupiter  appears to have more water than anyone expected. Newly released data from  NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested. The surprise result has scientists delving deep again into results from  NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter , which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. (Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.) Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for sc...
Read more