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Both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin offer you ~4 minutes of weightlessness. Can this sub-orbital model scale in such a way to have, say, 60 minutes of weightl
by crb 5y ago
Both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin offer you ~4 minutes of weightlessness.
Can this sub-orbital model scale in such a way to have, say, 60 minutes of weightlessness? Or is the "straight up, straight down" model such that sub-orbital flight has a cap at 4?
- codezero 5y agolow-earth orbit is around 90 minutes per orbit, so 60 minutes may be possible but I think it would require odd re-entry or a distant recovery that wouldn't be economical, probably at that length they'd just go into orbit.
- teraflop 5y agoA "suborbital" trajectory is just an orbit that intersects Earth's surface, and in theory you can make it whatever size and duration you want. I suppose the limit would be when your apogee becomes high enough to be near or beyond Earth's gravitational sphere of influence, which would happen for orbital periods on the order of months. Practically speaking, if you have enough thrust and delta-v to achieve a suborbital flight of more than a few tens of minutes, you also have the ability to reach orbit, so why bother?