I wonder how much the additional twenty kilometers will be worth in the market? Jonathan McDowell makes a pretty good case that the line actually should be eighty kilometers. Von Karman never declared it to be a hundred.
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I wonder how much the additional twenty kilometers will be worth in the market?
It’s another two minutes of weightlessness. I would think that would be the substantial selling point for Blue Origin instead of the “it’s not really space” argument.
If traveling more horizontal, one gets “more of a view”.
One can also travel more distance, and with incremental improvement, could actually get somewhere.
“One can also travel more distance”
In the comments of the article Rand linked to someone mentioned quick suborbital flights to distant destinations as a possible market for these vehicles.
Suborbital route to a destination 90º takes almost as much delta V as LEO. See http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2014/06/travel-on-airless-worlds.html
So you’d need a second stage.
I believe both Musk and Bezos are well on their way towards developing reusable boosters. Economic reusable upper stages are much more difficult.
Suborbital flights from Tokyo to Los Angeles would likely entail disposable upper stages for some time to come. Not affordable transportation
–Hop David
February 23, 2019 At 9:43 AM
“One can also travel more distance”
In the comments of the article Rand linked to someone mentioned quick suborbital flights to distant destinations as a possible market for these vehicles.
Suborbital route to a destination 90º takes almost as much delta V as LEO. See http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2014/06/travel-on-airless-worlds.html
So you’d need a second stage.–
11.25 degrees is about 1200 km [750 miles].
Start with less than this, in terms of doing “joyrides”. Say, 200 miles. And such a ride could be worth more than up and down.
So, Virgin does 50 trips of up and down, than offers a different trip which goes modest distant [200 miles] and later 500 miles.
In terms suborbital travel, you do it in hops, say two 22.5 degree hops. It seems if going 1/4 way around world or more, one just go orbital and then de-orbit. And for such longer hauls, you have lots of passengers, say more than 50.
If using two motherships and two hop can you get to Tokyo from San Francisco [5136 miles/8265.6 km]?
22.5 degrees = about 2500 km. 2: 5000 km. And short by about 3300 km [2050 miles]. The mothership could fly in direction of Tokyo, launch rocket. spacecraft needs to land at mid point. Refuel or re-board another spacecraft. Mothership again flies towards Tokyo and launches and spacecraft lands before Tokyo and then one re-boards a plane and flies into Tokyo.
But any suborbital travel will require larger passenger sizes, and probably the case with even short hops of 200 miles.
Of course advantage with orbital rather than sub orbital is you get there faster, and for long distance, faster would the main selling feature. But a couple hops and time flying in mothership, should the cut time by about 1/2 .
Let’s see, that is about 11 hours, now.
So instead that, about 3 hours of flying, and about 30 mins of hopping- 1/3 of the time of normal airline.
And orbital is about 1/10th of the time to travel that distance
Neither company have any prices, so tough to say at this point.
Pretty sure the price for VG has been $250K for several years now. I expect that when BO publishes a price, they’ll try to do it accordingly. But they’re different experiences in several ways, not just altitude, of time of free fall.
Well, time will tell if their promises will bear out and whether or not any price differences will make the other stuff matter. Price sensitivity might not matter much for their small markets.
I don’t care for redefining an arbitrary line.
It’s not completely arbitrary. There is a physical basis for it, as long as one doesn’t try to be too precise.
Indeed, it was explained to me that not only was 100 kilometers a nice round number for the politicians to remember, but the altitude is just about the minimum that you could reliably send a pointy ended orbiting vehicle around the Earth, and get once around without turning on a rocket engine. Apparently that was tried once or twice during the Corona program in the 1960s as well, though I don’t know what their intel pics were like from it.
Bezos is working on an upper stage. So far as I know Branson is not.
So Bezos’ vehicle is potentially a reusable booster.
A ticket on Branson’s vehicle is an expensive carnival ride. A ticket on Bezos’ ride goes to developing potentially game changing technologies.
No contest in my book.