Suborbital

Suborbital

Subject: Science and Tech

Concept: Suborbital” is a term you’ll be hearing a lot as Sir Richard Branson flies aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity winged spaceship and Jeff Bezos flies aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle to touch the boundary of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.

Concept:

• it means that 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 .Anything that launches to space but does not have sufficient horizontal velocity to stay in space – like these rockets – comes back to Earth and therefore flies a suborbital trajectory
• If a spacecraft or anything else, reaches a speed of 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h) or more, instead of falling back to the ground, it will continuously fall around the Earth. That continuous falling is what it means to be in orbit and is how satellites and the Moon stay above Earth.
• Anything that launches to space but does not have sufficient horizontal velocity to stay in space like these rockets comes back to Earth and therefore flies a suborbital trajectory.
• The astronauts will reach space but won’t enter orbit, so their flights will be suborbital.