< General Studies Home Page 

• What is Suborbital Flight?
• Other Significance
• Recent tourism space flight
• Concerns

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Introduction: 

What is suborbital Flight?

• Suborbital flights don’t have enough speed to escape into orbit. Any orbit without enough energy to reach orbit will instead follow a parabolic trajectory, looping up and then back down again. This will be a suborbital space mission or suborbital flight.
• Such flights are short, but passengers can experience mind-blowing view of Earth and will also experience several minutes of weightlessness. This thus can attract space tourists.

Why weightlessness?

• During downward path, a section of the flight is a free fall.

Other Significances:

• Microgravity experiments can also be carried out on these flights. This would be much cheaper than doing these experiments in International Space Stations.
• It could also be a cheaper way of testing space flight technologies or experiments before they are sent on more expensive orbital or deep space missions.

Space Tourism

• Space Tourism is the segment of space travel which provides non-astronauts the ability to go to space for recreational, leisure or business purposes. The idea is to make space more accessible for anyone who can afford it.
• In the past, NASA and Russian Space Agency used to take tourists for space travel. For e.g. Dennis Tito was the first commercial spaceflight passenger before which only astronauts used to go to space. He went to space on Russian Soyuz TMA Launch Vehicle in April 2001. After him, between 2001-2009, few other space tourists went to space, aboard a Russian Soyuz space to ISS, brokered by Space Adventures (an American Space Tourist company) in conjunction with Roscosmos.

Recent tourism space flights:

• Virgin Galactic is a company which was established by British Entrepreneur Richard Branson in 2004.
  • In July 2021, Richard Branson and five others undertook a brief trip to the edge of the space, taking off on a VSS unity spaceship.
• Blue Origin was established by Jeff Bezos in 2000. It’s reusable rocket New Shepherd successfully completed first human flight to space recently (20^th July 2021) with four private citizens onboard in Jeff Bezos. The flight went about 107 km. 
• SpaceX’s Inspiration4 – debut of SpaceX’s tourism business (Sep 2021)
  • Falcon 9 rocket took a crew Dragon spacecraft with 4 civilians (first all civilian space flight) into space. They travelled to an altitude of 575 km, even higher than HST and ISS. In the orbits around the planet, they would see 15 sunsets and sunrise every day.
    
    

    Comparison of Blue Origin                   and Galactic

• Other than these three, companies such as Virgin Atlantic, XCOR Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace are working on providing space tourism services to people.

Flight upto what height can be considered Spaceflight:

• There is no legal definition of “outer space”, and thus there is no official boundary where airspace ends and outer space begins.
• According to the International Aeronautic Federation, an altitude above 100 KM above sea level i.e. Karman Line is space. But, this  doesn’t coincide with the boundary of any of the atmosphere’s scientifically defined layers. It also considers that an altitude of 47 km (50 miles) would qualify as spaceflight.

Concerns

Climate change may be aggravated by Space Tourism.

• • There are concerns that space vehicles in future may become some of the biggest contribution in pollution and Climate change. It’s because rockets emit upto 100 times more carbon dioxide per passenger than airplane.
  • An MIT study has shown that soot released from rocket launches are far more effective at warming the atmosphere when compared to other sources. This is because they emit gaseous and solid chemicals directly into the upper atmosphere. Further, black carbon soot, are almost 500 times more efficient at retaining heat.
  • The study also showed that space tourism may undermine progress made by the Montreal Protocol in reversing ozone depletion. This is because the pollutants from rocket fuel and heating caused by spacecraft returning to earth, along with the debris caused by flights are specially harmful to the ozone layer.
• Available only for highly rich people.

Way forward

• Urgent need of environmental regulation to reduce the climatic damage space tourism industry may cause.
• Promote Green Space Tourism: Blue Origins New Shepherd didn’t produce any pollutant and these technologies need to be promoted in coming future for space tourism.
• Make Space Tourism more inclusive by making it affordable: As, the space industry grows, better efficiencies and scales would be achieved, making space travel for inclusive.

Conclusion

• The recent efforts by the private space industry to increase access to space may become early pioneers in maritime exploration and aviation and may change humankind forever.

Question:

• What is Space Tourism? Enumerate some recent developments in the Space Tourism Sector. [10 marks, 150 words]