Suborbital flights

Virgin Galactic's suborbital flight in July has started a new race, and a new debate!

Suborbital flights

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• The story: In July 2021, a six person crew on Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spaceship undertook a brief trip to the “edge of space” which is known as Suborbital Flight.
• People: Ms. Sirisha Bandla, an astronaut born in India, was a part of the crew. She was the third woman of Indian origin to go to space after Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams. Virgin Galactic is a British-American spaceflight company, operating in the United States.
• Suborbital Flight/Trajectory: When an object travels at a horizontal speed of about 28,000 km/hr or more, it goes into orbit once it is above the atmosphere. The satellites need to reach that threshold speed (orbital velocity) in order to orbit Earth. Such a satellite would be accelerating towards the Earth due to gravity, but its horizontal movement is fast enough to offset the downward motion so that it moves along a circular path. Any object travelling slower than 28,000 km/hr must eventually return to Earth. Any object that launches to space but does reach sufficient horizontal velocity to stay in space falls back to Earth. Hence they fly in a suborbital trajectory. So while these vehicles will cross the ill-defined boundary of space, they will not be going fast enough to stay in space once they get there.
• Importance: Such flights would provide increased flight access for design innovation and experimental manipulation due to high projected flight rates. Suborbital flights will be helpful for microgravity research. Microgravity is the condition in which people or objects appear to be weightless. They could also be an alternative to parabolic flights in aeroplanes that space agencies currently use to simulate zero gravity. Zero Gravity or Zero-G can simply be defined as the state or condition of weightlessness. They would be less expensive than carrying experiments and people to the International Space Station.
• Karman Line: The widely accepted boundary of space is known as the Karman line. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) defines Karman Line as the altitude of 100 kilometres above Earth’s mean sea level. The Kármán line has been compared to international waters, as there are no national boundaries and human laws in force beyond the line. It is named after Theodore von Karman (1881–1963), a Hungarian American engineer and physicist, who was active primarily in aeronautics and astronautics.

 

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