Flights of Bezos, Branson are nothing new from technical angle - Roscosmos
MOSCOW. Aug 4 (Interfax) - The suborbital flights of billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are not something new from the technical angle, but will facilitate public access to outer space, Roscosmos Executive Director for Manned Space Programs Sergei Krikalev said.
"Strictly speaking, this is not a space flight. What we call a space flight is an orbital flight, which happens when we reach a space orbit. In this case, they have not reached an orbit but simply climbed to an altitude where orbiting becomes possible but the velocity is insufficient for turning around the Earth," Krikalev said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel (VGTRK).
"Suborbital flights resemble those performed by us, the Americans and the Europeans onboard laboratory planes, where zero gravity lasts for about 30 seconds. It lasts longer, for three or four minutes, in the case of parabola. But, in fact, we have been doing the same for decades during parabolic flights and onboard laboratory planes," he said.
This kind of flights "is yet another, intermediate class that will allow broader public involvement in the development of technology and could serve as a halfway step to outer space, which a suborbital flight is," he said.
A passenger capsule carrying Bezos and three more passengers successfully touched down near a space center in Texas on July 20, as they returned from a flight propelled by a New Shepard rocket.
The flight lasted for slightly less than 11 minutes. It was streamed on the website of the BlueOrigin.com company, established by Amazon and Blue Origin founder Bezos.
The U.S. businessman was accompanied by his brother Mark Bezos, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk who waited for the flight for 60 years (she was trained in the 1960s but never had a chance to go to space), and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen.
Back on July 11, the Unity spacecraft carrying Richard Branson and a crew successfully landed after a suborbital flight, which lasted for one hour. The White Knight Two dual-fuselage jet aircraft carried Unity to the launch altitude, where it separated and started its own engines for climbing to over 80 kilometers.
Once the climb was complete, the Unity stood still for a few minutes so that passengers had a chance to see the Earth before beginning the descent. Although the streaming was interrupted, Branson managed to address the viewers and to congratulate them on the event.
In contrast to Branson's spacecraft, the New Shepard of Bezos crossed the imaginary line between the Earth atmosphere and outer space at an altitude of 100 kilometers, the media said.
