7.03.2022
For half a century there was only one way to fly to space: Be one of the few lucky individuals chosen by national space programs like NASA or Russia's Roscosmos.
Being chosen to be an astronaut or cosmonaut meant facing years of training before even being considered for a flight on a space shuttle or Soyuz rocket.
But with space tourism becoming a reality, hundreds, if not thousands, of would-be "astronauts" will need to be trained for spaceflight over the next few years.
But where exactly does one go to get astronaut training?
It could very well end up being a $270 million facility just outside Kennedy Space Center.
Space Florida, the state agency charged with promoting the space industry in Florida, has been working with a company to build a "human spaceflight service center" near Kennedy Space Center. As is typical with these deals, Space Florida isn't naming the company planning the facility, which the agency has dubbed "Project Beach House."
At a board meeting last month, Space Florida CEO Frank DiBello said Project Beach House would be a private astronaut training facility. Space Florida documents indicate that the facility would employ at least 200 people with an average annual wage of $50,000 by 2025.
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SpaceX has already launched four private astronauts from Kennedy Space Center on the Inpsiration4 mission. Blue Origin has launched 14 space tourists, including company CEO Jeff Bezos, on three separate missions from West Texas.
Last July, Virgin Galactic made it first flight to space with passengers from New Mexico. On board were two Virgin Galactic pilots, company founder Richard Branson and three other Virgin Galactic employees.
Of course, the company that pioneered space tourism is Space Adventures, a Virginia company that partnered with Russia's Roscosmos to fly paying customers to the International Space Station aboard Souyz rockets beginning in 2001. Space Adventures arranged trips to the ISS for six people, including one, Charles Simonyi, who made two trips.
A new company, Space Perspectives, plans to use balloons to lift passengers to the edge of space in a pressurized gondola from Brevard County.
How much training do you need to visit space?
So, how much training does one need to fly into space? That depends.
For folks taking quick suborbital hops like those being offered by Blue Origin, minimal training is needed since the flights last less than an hour and are fully automated.
Longer flights will require additional training, if for no other reason than to learn to use special toilets that work in low-gravity environments.
Jared Isaacman, the billionaire behind last year's Inspiration4 private space mission with SpaceX, famously tried to replicate much of NASA's astronaut training. He and his crewmates were whirled on a centrifuge, learned to recognize the signs of low oxygen in an altitude chamber and climbed Mt. Rainier together as a team-building exercise over several months of training.
Not every future private astronaut is going to get that level of training.
"With the number of people that are projected to go into space, the commercial industry doesn't have the luxury of time, to be able to invest two years into training these people," said Glenn King, director of advanced pilot & space training at the National Aerospace Training and Research (NASTAR) Center in Southampton, Pennsylvania. "The commercial space industry needs to get training down to a matter of weeks, and possibly days to get these people into space."
Some of the training private astronauts need will be specific to the vehicle they will fly in. Other training will involve whatever science or research, if any, they astronauts will be performing.
But some of the training will need to focus on preparing would-be astronauts for the rigors of space travel.
What does the future of space tourism, travel look like?
Some space enthusiasts foresee a future where space travel is as common as air travel is today.
But unlike air travel, spaceflight submits passengers to experiences they likely haven't been through before such a high Gs during launches that can feel like a heavy weight pushing down on their chests and weightlessness while in orbit. Even professional astronauts have struggled with "space adaption syndrome," a kind of motion sickness induced by weightlessness.
That's where companies like NASTAR step in. The company has helped trained astronauts for Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and Axiom Space.
Among the tools it uses is a state-of-the-art centrifuge that can mimic the flight profile's of various spacecraft. It also has an altitude chamber that can mimic rapid cabin decompression, gyroscopic chambers to mimic the spatial disorientation of space flight, and a disaster simulator that allows participants to train to react to different disaster scenarios.
"You need very good equipment to provide authentic, and very realistic, space training," King said.
And that equipment doesn't come cheaply. A high-performance centrifuge alone can cost tens of millions of dollars, King said. "You just can't go to the centrifuge store and pick one up off the shelf and say 'I'll take that' and the bolt it to your garage floor."
King said the cost of the space training NASTAR offers, which focuses on the physiology of space flight, can run as high as $15,000.
Of course, $15,000 is no barrier for the billionaires pioneering private space travel.
The idea of billionaires paying tens of millions of dollars for orbital "joy rides" does have its critics.
"Here on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor — but hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space!" Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted last summer following Branson's flight.
But Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida, predicts that billionaire space tourism is just a stepping stone to the industrialization of space, which he believes is necessary to solve some of the world's most pressing problems like climate change.
"It’s a stretch for people to grasp it. We’re talking about 'How do we put industry off the planet into space?" Metzger said on a UCF podcast last year. "But we’ve been working on these concepts for decades and we really believe that by the end of the century, we should be able to put at least a half of our industrial footprint off the planet. ... And so even if it’s only a half, that’s going to be really helpful to our planet."
And while large-scale extraplanetary industry may be decades off, Metzger and King say it won't be long before large numbers of people begin to travel to space not for tourism, but for work, either as researchers or people building space facilities for those researchers, and perhaps some for tourists.
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So will specially trained construction workers become the astronauts of the future?
"So we're going to need an influx of space workers, who are going to go to space and assemble these habitats, and go to the moon, and stay there for months at a time assembling these habitats," King said.
It would seem likely that most of those will begin their space journeys in Brevard County, the only place in North America that has ever launched humans to orbit.
And in doing so, they will help bolster two of the county's biggest industries: space and tourism.
In the early days, though, there might not be many of those tourists. Instead those who come will have big wallets.
"They'll come in their private jets,' said Lynda Weatherman, CEO of the Economic Development Commission of Florida's Space Coast. "It might not be many, but it will be high end and maybe that number grows."
King said about 600 people have already been through his company's space training, and added the NASTAR is gearing up to train far more.
"So we're gonna look at the accelerated program for 2022 and beyond," he said. "Especially with the space workers, need to start getting trained to go to space. So we're at the tip of the iceberg for the explosion in trading to happen."
Quelle: Florida Today