19 July 2021
Blue Origin ready for first crewed New Shepard launch 20 July
... carry Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and three others on a 10 minute flight to the edge of space. Bezos will be the second billionaire to reach suborbital space in less than two weeks, having been pipped to the post by Virgin...
July 2019
Lessons from our first race to the Moon
... safely to Earth “before the decade is out”. He had been impressed by the massive popular reaction in the US to the suborbital flight of Scott Carpenter a month earlier, and saw a Moon landing as an initiative that could establish the US as the world...
June 2017
Spaceplane rationale - a new way of thinking
... to satellite speed that requires most of the energy - just climbing to space altitude requires far less. A so-called suborbital flight, up and down again with just a few minutes in space, requires a maximum speed of about 1 km per second, or about...
May 2024
Spaceflight revolution on a shoestring
... We propose to develop the lower stage first, as it can operate on its own carrying 20 passengers in an attached module on suborbital flights. Suborbital flights have a trajectory close to the vertical and provide just a few minutes in space. Orbital...
October 2019
Time to overcome the expendable rocket mindset
.... The Spacecab upper stage could be either a passenger module carrying about 20 people that remains attached for a suborbital flight, or a reusable orbiter that separates at Mach 4 and carries on to orbit under rocket power. The key to this low...
September 2021
Near space - the air-space boundary question, astronauts and space tourism
... the nature of what it is to be an astronaut. The media has been eager to discuss whether those flying on the two suborbital flights qualify as astronauts based largely on the altitude of the mission. As will be shown, there is more to it than simply...
