What makes this moment feel different is not a new government-backed space race but the soaring ambitions of entrepreneurs backed by reservoirs of money, top-notch engineering talent and increasingly refined technology. Instead of 48 flights a year, it averaged four.
Instead, the shuttle fleet flew 135 missions over 30 years and was decommissioned in 2011. NASA promised the space shuttle would fly 580 missions during its first dozen years of operation. The Apollo missions to the Moon were going to pave the way for human settlement of the solar system. Of course, we’ve been anticipating a true space age since “The Jetsons” debuted in 1962, seven months after John Glenn first orbited the Earth. Eventually, they will service outposts on the Moon itself (a three-day trip) and possibly Mars. Those rockets could carry dozens of people, and head to laboratories, factories and tourist resorts a few hundred miles up in low-Earth orbit, or they could be stationed farther out, between the Earth and the Moon. A rocket could go to orbit every day, compared with just 85 launches worldwide in 2016. Exotic, specialized and more dangerous than staffing a cubicle-but not rare or restricted.Ī constellation of commercial outposts will be serviced by a fleet of reusable spaceships. But in the zero gravity era, going to space will be no more dramatic than helicoptering out to an offshore oil rig. You might be a scientist or an engineer or a technician (or a journalist) you might be going for a one-time, two-week research effort or rotating in for your usual six-week posting. The zero gravity era will mark the moment when you no longer have to be special to go to space. (These days, typically, there are six people.) By 2030, it’s possible that many dozens of people at a time will be working and living in space. If the new-wave space entrepreneurs manage to radically change the economics of space travel as they promise to do, kids in high school today could spend a slice of their careers working in space, not as astronauts but the way a young diplomat or banker today might take a posting in London or Hong Kong. We are on the verge of a zero gravity era. Few others have had that chance.īut that’s about to change: Weightlessness is not only about to be democratized. The last 27 seconds have been unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. At two G, you have a sensation of being pinned down. The physics of these flights is such that we go from weighing nothing-from zero G-to feeling like we weigh close to twice what we normally do.
I don’t quite make it to the floor before gravity grabs me hard, but without a sound. “Feet down!” yells a crew member named Robert. I grab for one of the guide ropes, and miss. You can be told a hundred times how little effort it takes to move when you’re weightless, but to actually calibrate it, to figure it out, you have to be in it. I push myself up off the floor, and bam!, the ceiling whacks me on the back. I scramble like a cartoon character who has raced off a cliff, arms and legs pinwheeling just before the fall. Sixty-nine-year-old Bobbe, floating in the middle of the fuselage, curls up and tries a somersault. Instead there’s 66 feet of wide open space, the better to make the most of the kind of acrobatic flying that shakes passengers loose from gravity.Īround me, my fellow fliers quickly take advantage of weightlessness. The plane, which provides scientists and thrill-seekers with the chance to experience weightlessness without going to space, has just seven rows of seats, way at the back. I’m out over the Gulf of Mexico in G-Force One, a vintage Boeing 727 that belongs to the Zero Gravity Corporation.
My body drifts up from the floor, and there is no force on me at all from any direction. One moment I am my normal self, lying flat on my back, gazing at the ceiling.
0 kommentar(er)
