It finally happened: Virgin Galactic took civilians to the edge of space. On Sunday, July 11, pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci flew Unity 22 to the edge of space with colleagues Richard Branson, Sirisha Bendla, Colin Bennett, and Beth Moses. With this flight, we entered a new domain of space tourism, where anyone with only an extra few hundred thousand can take a vacation that includes suborbital flight.

While this news may seem like it’s only exciting for the super-rich and their personally chosen guests, there may be some positive benefits to normal folks wanting to do science. These tourism rockets will increase access to suborbital opportunities for research and technology development. NASA’s Flight Opportunities program allows NASA and other researchers to get zero g/vacuum time either through parabolic flights in a plane, high altitude flights in a balloon, or suborbital flights in either a sounding rocket or commercial tourism vehicle.

A plane flying parabolas can provide over twelve minutes of weightlessness for a payload, which is more than a suborbital rocket, but in 30-second bursts followed by double gravity. Planes are therefore used for medical experiments, robotic systems, and space manufacturing.

Stratospheric balloons don’t allow for any microgravity research but do allow payloads to spend weeks in the upper atmosphere which is useful for some payloads such as solar observation, earth observation, or drop tests such as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) which tested new heat shield technology for future Mars missions.

Commercial tourism rockets allow new capabilities for science. New Shepard can carry up to 100.5 kilograms of payloads for three minutes of pure microgravity. Payloads can be mounted both inside the pressurized crew capsule and outside on the booster. These different payload capabilities permit not just zero-g research but also rocket guidance demonstrations such as the Navigation Doppler LIDAR, which will be used to help “precision soft landings on the Moon and Mars”. That payload flew on a New Shepard booster in October 2020. 

The other major space tourism vehicle, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, is also registered in the Flight Opportunities program. SpaceShipTwo can carry 450 kilograms of payload for the same three minutes of weightlessness as New Shepard, despite going to a slightly lower apogee of 80 kilometers. A NASA Flight Opportunities payload that has flown on New Shepard is the COLLisions Into Dust Experiment (COLLIDE) which we’ve previously talked about here on Daily Space.

Besides increased payload mass and microgravity time, suborbital tourist rockets also allow quicker access to science payloads after landing. SpaceShipTwo is the easiest since it returns right to a runway. Scientists can get immediate access to their payloads for analysis. New Shepard also allows for quick access since it doesn’t land far away from the launch site and payloads (passengers) are supposed to be extracted quickly. Combined with the increased microgravity time this makes them better options compared to a zero-g plane or a sounding rocket, which also lands on a runway but provides shorter microgravity time and has payloads that are not always designed to be recovered after launch.

In addition to NASA and university researchers, the new tourist rockets allow school students to fly payloads into space. One such payload is on Blue Origin’s New Shepard. Teachers In Space, Inc. provides kits of 1 to 3 Unit 3D printed CubeSat chassis, about the size of a loaf of bread (10x10x30cm). Teachers In Space calls this a Cube Frame, and it comes with all the necessary electronics to support a payload that the students make. All of the electronics are based on the Arduino microcontroller system. The first flight of a Cube Frame payload was May 2019. Teachers In Space offers the kits and a curriculum with different phases. Teachers can pick which parts they wish to use or buy a complete package including a flight on either a balloon, jet, or suborbital rocket.

These rockets will also allow more human researchers to make regular suborbital flights, not just payloads, though no plans have been announced either by NASA, Virgin Galactic, or Blue Origin. However, Mission Specialist Sirisha Bandla did perform a crew-tended experiment on this past weekend’s Unity 22 flight of SpaceShipTwo which involved her activating preservatives in special tubes full of plants at key times before, during, and after microgravity.

More Information

Virgin Galactic press release

NASA and Blue Origin Help Classrooms and Researchers Reach Space (NASA)

NASA Tipping Point Partnership with Blue Origin to Test Precision Lunar Landing Technologies (NASA)

NASA-Supported Plant Experiment Flies to Suborbital Space with Virgin Galactic (NASA)