You probably know or have heard some millionaire on the radio or on TV saying he or she bought a ticket to one of the many private suborbital space enterprises such as Virgin Galactic or XCOR.
Furthermore, you might have heard them talking about the extensive training they have begun with zero-gravity parabola flights, or even g-training in Russian MIG-planes. They are getting prepared…
For what?
If you were to stay on the International Space Station for 3-6 months, or go to Mars, the 1 percent loss of bone and muscle mass every month might pose a problem – perfect physiological and psychological health is required.
But we are talking about a 15-minute ride into space, and I want to tell you why training for such flights is nothing more than another chapter in the I-did-this story-telling at the local golf or chesterfield club.
Let’s divide training into two parts. First, you get physical and psychological training for going into space, dealing with the g-loads, stress and claustrophobia. Second, you get mission training such as operating the control panels, panic egress, parachuting and pilot-operations in general.
Let’s be honest. The second part does not apply to space tourists. You get a seat and hopefully enjoy the ride. No matter how much you want to leave the plane, fiddle with control panels or fly the plane – it is not going to happen. You are a paying passenger, just like on a regular airliner.
This leaves us with only physical and psychological training.
If you cannot handle boarding a suborbital rocket or plane – psychologically - you cannot handle any part of the flight in general. Tourist-rides into space deal with rich, paying customers, and the entire ride is tailored to be psychologically "approved" by performing soft flight maneuvers.
Think about it. Virgin Galactic takes off horizontally and let you descend like a feather falling to Earth. Burt Rutan might not have created this flight mode to accommodate rich tourists, but Richard Branson surely saw the potential for sending people into space - without facing a real launch or splashdown.
Virgin Galactic offers training some days before departure -- which is not a bad thing -- and might let you try out zero-g on a parabolic plane. During descent the g-load is approximately three times the normal gravity (3G) and 6G maximum for a brief period at 110,000 feet (33,500 meters) during ascent.[1]
So, let’s look into the physical training.
There is really nothing much your body can adapt to within a couple of days, so this is all just for trying out and avoiding any embarrassing tourist panic moments. I guess that is also why Virgin Galactic is calling it “familiarization”.
If you look at data available on the internet about body acceleration versus body orientation and time, you will find that unless you are physically impaired the loads experienced during the Virgin flight are fine for everyone.
Below are data from my favorite document NASA MSIS showing that while sitting down and being accelerated forward (+Gx), you are in the clear, based on normal human-body performance.
We faced some arguments on dangerous g-loads related to our first configuration, which provided 5g while sitting up (+Gz). In trying to understand what 5g felt like, we went to the local amusement park Tivoli, in downtown Copenhagen, and rode the Vertigo 10 times. This machine (available for anybody - even people in wheelchair!) gives you approximately 5.2G during a 20-second burst. Even though we were dizzy, we were fine.
Even the most hardboiled astronaut may be knocked out experiencing 14G during a LES-run. But a LES run is a last means of survival, and the mission is over. Being fully mentally present is not the goal in this case.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a post about Virgin Galactic or another suborbital space endeavor. I salute all these projects and we find great inspiration here. But we face questions all the time about our training and if we are capable of handling the ride physically.
So, besides the operations training of our pilot, YES - we are in the clear physically, and so are all the paying future space tourists.
Ad Astra
Kristian von Bengtson
