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Volume 39Space travel seems to be on a trajectory toward becoming safer and more affordable.” If you could take a 24-hour trip into low Earth orbit for the cost of a first-class trans-Atlantic flight, would you go?
Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage
Thomas Nicolaysen from Patreon asks, “Space travel seems to be on a trajectory toward becoming safer and more affordable.” If you could take a 24-hour trip into low Earth orbit for the cost of a first-class trans-Atlantic flight, would you go?
Assuming the cost of flying to space were the same as a trans-Atlantic flight, I’m assuming that the level of safety would be about the same as well. If that were the case, then, yeah, I’d do it. Why not? I think weightlessness would be an interesting thing to experience, and you’d get a pair of astronaut wings.
That being said, I’m not sure that we will ever get to that point in our lifetime. The cost of reaching orbit has dropped dramatically over the last 20 years, and it looks as if it will continue to drop for the foreseeable future.
However, there will always be an issue with energy. Getting to orbit will always require more energy than a long-haul flight. Likewise, entering the Earth’s atmosphere from orbit is always going to be difficult.
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