Surely we have all rode bikes, buses, subways, trains, cars and a for a good amount people ridden airplanes, but it appears that list will not stop there at all, and perhaps this will be happening sooner rather than later. For some time now, some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs have been battling to be the first to really revolutionize space travel for the world, claiming each of them that they will be the ones responsible for bringing space tourism to our reality.
The three main billionaires involved with this space race are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, started his company Blue Origin in 2000. The vision of this company wants to see millions of people living in space, believing that it will be the only way to preserve earth. One of the biggest issues with space travel is the large cost associated with sending rockets into space, and one solution to lowering that cost is being able to reuse the same rockets.
Its newest reusable rocket is named New Shepard which will be a capsule attached to the top of a 60 foot rocket.. In 2019, Bezos is planning to use New Shepard to send passengers on trips into space. The passengers will find themselves inside a comfortable capsule before they are launched over the atmosphere where they will be able to look back down at earth. Blue Origin has not yet announced how much this ride will cost its passengers, but it is being speculated to be a couple thousand dollars per person.
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Suborbital tourism is just the beginning of Bezos vision for his company Blue Origin, what comes next is already being worked on and that is a rocket meant for orbit and beyond due to Bezos belief that we will eventually use up everything earth has to offer and will need to move humans to another place when this does happen, so his final goal is to get people living in space. The need to be able to reuse launch vehicles has led to Blue Origin trying to develop a vehicle capable of vertical landing. On March 5, 2005, Blue Origin tested this with its space vehicle named Charon, after it launched it was able to hover in air at 300 plus feet before its autonomous software, controlling the thrusters, was able to lower itself back the flight pad thus successfully vertically landing. After this Blue Origin started to build and fly actual rockets and in 2015 Blue Origin began sending up the New Shepard. This new vehicle was able to successfully separate the capsule from its booster, which includes the propulsion system, and then recover the capsule. In a test the capsule was able to continue traveling in the air for 66 miles.
Later that year, New Shepard landed a booster for the first time. While the capsule is falling back to the ground it uses three enormous parachutes along with its retrorockets to keep the vehicle from falling too fast. Bezos says that Blue Origin will carry humans into space in the first half of 2019 and later that year will begin its suborbital tourist business. The flight will be made for comfort and also automated. Bezos believes customers will need about a day of training and also sign a requirement waiver before being able to ride. The vehicle will have six seats arranged in a circle, all of which will be looking through huge windows and will also have a computer display show footage of the takeoff, the booster and capsule separating, among other things as well. Once the capsule enters space there will be a couple minutes for the passengers to take off their seat belts and without gravity move around. Following those couple minutes a recorded voice will let the passengers know it is time that they remove to their seats. There will not be a flight attendants such as on a plane and Bezos does not believe that they should need one. The duration of this trip will be around 10 minutes total. This tourism for Bezos will only be the beginning and hopefully with it will come the future of millions of humans living out in space. For Bezos this move to space will be our only option in the future and it is just a matter of time.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, also known as the founder of Tesla vehicles. Like Bezos, Musk too believes that one of the most important things in humanity going forwards is making life multi planetary. Musks original plan was to go to Russia to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile, which he tried to do three times, and then use it to send to Mars to try and spark peoples interest in space exploration again. The icbm was too expensive though so the plan fell apart and led Musk to the idea that he would have to build his own rocket. As of 2012, Musk had invested around 100 million dollars into this business which he had no idea for certain would succeed. SpaceX manufactures almost all of its parts as Musk views it as more efficient and costing less. 1400 engineers and skilled technicians work at its large factory near Los Angeles essentially building all the parts of its spacecrafts. SpaceX first three test flights of its Falcon 1 failed to reach orbit. They disovered the third failure was due to a two second glitch in the timing and the fourth launch was successful. Musk believes that the company would not have had the resources to come up with a fifth launch had the fourth launch failed. In December 2010 SpaceX tested a larger and more powerful nine engine rocket called the Falcon 9 and cargo capsule called Dragon. On its first launch it performed perfectly, orbiting the earth twice before landing the in Pacific Ocean. The cargo capsule Dragon does have windows and was always designed with the purpose of carrying astronauts. SpaceX Falcon rockets cost about $130,000 whereas the cost of typical NASA shuttles would be around $1,000,000. Also will carry 7 passengers just like the shuttle but will not have as much room for cargo.
Emphasis on rapid and complete reusabilty. With any other vehicle such as a car or airplane there is nothing you get rid off on it after riding it once and that is the theory they are trying to apply to spacecrafts. Friction steel welded aluminum lithium is used on the main F frame of the space ship which is one of the many things that make it unique. For this they actually had to make their own machine to be able to join lithium and aluminum because there was not a machine out there before that could do this. In December 2010, Dragon became the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to ever be successfully launched and recovered from orbit. They have built in a launch escape system where if something goes wrong in the launch and the rocket there are escape thrusters built on the side of the dragon spacecraft that can fire and take the dragon spacecraft away from the rocket and safety. SpaceX, Musk says sees mainly only China as its competition in its race towards getting people to Mars. NASA has given SpaceX technical advice and a contract worth up to 1.6 billion dollars mostly for 12 cargo flight to the space station. Some NASA and space legends however are concerned with SpaceX little experience such as Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan, and they have testified to Congress that Obamas administration drive to commercialize space could compromise safety and effect taxpayers. All in all Dragon has visited the Space Station 16 total times to date and SpaceX hopes that by next year with an upgraded Dragon will be able to return human spaceflight to the US for the first time since 2011. Dragon is able to average 173,000 mph on its way to the space station and carry 5,600 pounds of cargo as well.
The Billionaire Space Race. (2022, May 08). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/the-billionaire-space-race/
