If You Can’t Afford a Quarter of a Million Dollars on a Spaceflight
As a physicist, I was curious to examine low cost situations reminiscent of the newest billionaire one upmanship game of travel to the edge of space. Of course, it is hard to match the devil-may-care risk factors of these first rocket trips to 50 or 62 miles altitude. The oneupmanship of 62 miles versus 50 is sort of lost when one remembers that 62 miles is 100 kilometers, probably partly chosen just because it is a round number in metric.
The physical stresses experienced by the edgeonauts (I prefer billionauts or giganauts) are three minutes of weightlessness, and 3 g’s of acceleration getting to the velocity needed to reach the altitude.
The 3 g’s is not hard, since some roller coasters reach this near the bottom of the first drop.
The near zero g’s is the simplest. Instead of standing where your weight is distributed on your thin ankles of about six square inches each, just lie down on your back on your couch or bed. With a giving mattress and pillow, your weight is now distributed over several square feet with little pressure, close to zero pressure in free fall. Most of us practice this for six to eight hours every night, at the cost of a mattress over decades.
If you want the experience of almost throwing up while in zero g, I recommend lying on your stomach after a meal.
The next level of zero g is to go sky diving. For ten seconds one is free falling until your velocity is high enough that the air resistance holds you at a fixed downward velocity. Then you can have anxiety wondering if your chute will open. Skydiving is done by 350,000 people a year in the US, who complete 3,000,000 jumps in a year, and is a lot safer than experimental rockets or rocket planes. What is the deceleration experienced when their chutes open? About 3 g’s. A skydive costs from $155 to $185. Skydiving sounds a lot more exciting than seeing the edge of space inside a rocket.
My closest approach to skydiving was taking the parachute drop on Coney Island. My real test of courage will be getting on a long flight to Kauai in mid-August, from Los Angeles, where the Delta Variant is increasing.
Actually, Bezos’ Blue Origin flight is safe because it has been tested unmanned 13 time. I would have preferred if he had named it Maximus Prime. The one paid passenger paid $28 million for the flight, but couldn’t make it because of a schedule conflict. I would settle for having such a scheduling conflict. The passenger is sending his son instead.
While the current drama is between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, I am reminded that Elon Musk actually sent his Tesla into far off space in February 2018, and at no risk to himself. It is in free fall forever!
Now us couch potatoes can experience far more of Space (the Final Frontier) in several ways on NASA.Gov.
Great pictures of Earth from space are on EarthObservatory.NASA.gov
There are virtual classroom size tours of the Jet Propulsion Lab which you can arrange at JPL.NASA.gov There is also a collection of monthly lectures on the site.
In Southern California you can see the Space Shuttle Endeavor at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. You must sign up for a timed entrance at CaliforniaScienceCenter.org
At the end of July, the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. will reopen.
Probably one of the salutary effects of pondering death to these billionaires, is that they may start wondering what humanitarian causes they would like to leave their fortunes to. Doling that out during their lives would gain them much more acclaim than just being an almostnaut.
