In a few years you will be able to buy a ticket for a ride to space, feel 0G and view the curvature of Earth. That's at least what space tourism companies are telling us. But how far from that are we?
Something most people forget about this is, that they won't actually be flying you to orbit. They plan to send you 100km up, wich technically is space, but 0G will be experienced for just a few minutes. Even curvature of the Earth won't be easily visible. And it's not like everyone will be able to go. Tickets will cost around $200.000 and waiting lines are long since hundreds of them have already been purchased.
Something most people forget about this is, that they won't actually be flying you to orbit. They plan to send you 100km up, wich technically is space, but 0G will be experienced for just a few minutes. Even curvature of the Earth won't be easily visible. And it's not like everyone will be able to go. Tickets will cost around $200.000 and waiting lines are long since hundreds of them have already been purchased.
Blue Origin
4Founded in 2000 by Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, this company's plans are close to reality. For years, it's been tought their progress was far behind Xcor and VG because they haven't released any footage (except a few short clips) until livestream of 2 launches in 2016. By now they have fully-tested suborbital rocket New Shepard and expect to start flights with test pilots this year and launch passengers in 2018, being the only ones that actually completed unmanned version of the mission.
Now that we've talked about the company, let's talk about the launch vehicel itself.
New Shepard has two main components: booster and the capsule. Both return back to the spaceport and are reused. There haven't been any details released on the capsule, except the fact that it will carry 6 people and uses 3 parachutes for landing, but we have some info on the booster. It has one BE-3 engine powered by combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (LH2+LOX) that has thrust of 490kN, about 1/2 as powerful as Merlin 1D with 850-900kN (but F9 uses 9 of them for the first stage coming at total of 9700kN). After Launch booster lands using main engine. BO already made a few of them. First one wasn't reused and crash-landed. Next booster was used for 4 flights. After in-flight launch abort system test that was excpected to destroy the booster (they fired a solid fuel engine right above it) it still managed to land and Jeff Bezos promised to put it on display at BO headquarters.
Now that we've talked about the company, let's talk about the launch vehicel itself.
New Shepard has two main components: booster and the capsule. Both return back to the spaceport and are reused. There haven't been any details released on the capsule, except the fact that it will carry 6 people and uses 3 parachutes for landing, but we have some info on the booster. It has one BE-3 engine powered by combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (LH2+LOX) that has thrust of 490kN, about 1/2 as powerful as Merlin 1D with 850-900kN (but F9 uses 9 of them for the first stage coming at total of 9700kN). After Launch booster lands using main engine. BO already made a few of them. First one wasn't reused and crash-landed. Next booster was used for 4 flights. After in-flight launch abort system test that was excpected to destroy the booster (they fired a solid fuel engine right above it) it still managed to land and Jeff Bezos promised to put it on display at BO headquarters.
BO is now working on 2 new projects: BE-4 engine for ULA's rocket Vulcan and New Glenn orbital rocket made in-house by BO as a competition to SpaceX's Falcon and is expected to fly for the first time in 2019.
Virgin Galactic
Founded in 2004 by Richard Branson, VG was excpected to be the first commercial spaceline for years. Their original plan was to fly passengers to space by 2015. Unfortunately during a test flight in 2014 VSS Enterprise crashed in Mojave desert with 2 test pilots onboard. Since then, there was no flights with their new SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity. They are excpected to start in this year but first flight with passengers probably won't happen for at least a few years.
Their very creatively named SpaceShipTwo is an aircraft that takes off under WhiteKnightTwo, separates 10km above ground and flies to the altitude of 100km using it's hybrid engine. That means, that it uses cryogenically frozen oxidizer and solid fuel, unlike NS wich uses criy frozen both oxidizer and propellant. System like this allows both lowering the thrust and uses stable propellant.
Their very creatively named SpaceShipTwo is an aircraft that takes off under WhiteKnightTwo, separates 10km above ground and flies to the altitude of 100km using it's hybrid engine. That means, that it uses cryogenically frozen oxidizer and solid fuel, unlike NS wich uses criy frozen both oxidizer and propellant. System like this allows both lowering the thrust and uses stable propellant.
Anyone else?
So there are many other companies planning to launch soon. But most of them don't have suffiecent funding or technology to do that anytime soon. One of them is Xcor and their spacecraft Lynx. But they are planning to launch directly from a runway (which would be really hard to achieve, even for VG or BO) and Lynx has only two seats: one for the pilot and one for a passengers so it will be significantly more expensive to fly in.
So, in the end, if you want to go to space you need about $200.000 and patience to wait for a few years. Waiting lines for a flight in SpaceShipTwo are already really long. But would YOU go to space?