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Suborbital Flight

  • Posted By
    10Pointer
  • Categories
    Science & Technology
  • Published
    26th Jul, 2021

The term‘Suborbital’ is a buzzword since Jeff Bezos flies aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle to touch the boundary of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.

Context

The term‘Suborbital’ is a buzzword since Jeff Bezos flies aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle to touch the boundary of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.

What is a Suborbital flight?

  • sub-orbital spaceflightis a flight in which the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects the atmosphere or surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched.
  • The spacecraft will not complete one orbital revolution or reach the escape velocity.
  • The spaceflight vehicles will cross the ill-defined boundary of space but they will not be going fast enough to stay in space once they get there.
  • These spacecraft launches to space but do not have sufficient horizontal velocity to stay in space.
  • They come back to Earth and therefore fly a suborbital trajectory.
  • During the fall of the spacecraft, the bodies feel weightlessness.

Escape velocity

  • The escape velocity is the minimum speed needed for a free, non-propelled object to escape from the gravitational influence of a massive body.
  • At this speed, the sum of an object's kinetic energy and its gravitation potential energy becomes zero.
  • Escape velocity rises with the body's mass and falls with the escaping object's distance from its center. 
  • The escape velocity from Earth's surface is about 11.2 Km/s.

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