Post by Owen on Sept 16, 2022 13:26:57 GMT
1 ~~~ Commercial Space Travel Is Closer Than Ever
And to prepare us for it, the French company Orbite is operating astronaut-training programs—with a luxe bent.
Jean-François Clervoy, a French astronaut who has spent almost a month in space, holds up a globe of water, releases it, and lets it spin away.
Blue as an ocean, it resembles a small Earth as it rotates past my nose.
I reach for it, and as my head tilts toward the floor, I see the globe shatter.
This small moment is one step along the way toward realizing an idea that for decades has existed only in the realm of fantasy: commercial space travel.
I haven't reached the final frontier yet, but I am preparing for it.
I'm a trainee space tourist, on a parabolic “Zero-G” flight in a converted Airbus A310 over the sea near Arcachon, on France's Atlantic coast, which is part of a four-day astronaut-training course run by French “space experience” company Orbite.
Here attendees participate in a kind of space boot camp, hopping on zero-gravity flights that offer the sensation of weightlessness; studying rocket science; and taking part in virtual-reality simulations that aim to re-create the experience of flying in some of the launch vehicles now hitting the market—one might go to the edge of space aboard a vessel based on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo or circumnavigate the moon on something akin to SpaceX's Starship, the low-orbit “cruise liner” that carried out flight trials in Texas this past summer.
www.cntraveler.com/story/commercial-space-travel-is-closer-than-ever?
7 September 2022
And to prepare us for it, the French company Orbite is operating astronaut-training programs—with a luxe bent.
Jean-François Clervoy, a French astronaut who has spent almost a month in space, holds up a globe of water, releases it, and lets it spin away.
Blue as an ocean, it resembles a small Earth as it rotates past my nose.
I reach for it, and as my head tilts toward the floor, I see the globe shatter.
This small moment is one step along the way toward realizing an idea that for decades has existed only in the realm of fantasy: commercial space travel.
I haven't reached the final frontier yet, but I am preparing for it.
I'm a trainee space tourist, on a parabolic “Zero-G” flight in a converted Airbus A310 over the sea near Arcachon, on France's Atlantic coast, which is part of a four-day astronaut-training course run by French “space experience” company Orbite.
Here attendees participate in a kind of space boot camp, hopping on zero-gravity flights that offer the sensation of weightlessness; studying rocket science; and taking part in virtual-reality simulations that aim to re-create the experience of flying in some of the launch vehicles now hitting the market—one might go to the edge of space aboard a vessel based on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo or circumnavigate the moon on something akin to SpaceX's Starship, the low-orbit “cruise liner” that carried out flight trials in Texas this past summer.
www.cntraveler.com/story/commercial-space-travel-is-closer-than-ever?
7 September 2022