Space Commercial Flights Can Shorten Travel Time Up To 20 Times

Virgin Galactic's super sonic aircraft. (photo; virgin galactic)

Aviation experts are conducting research on how ordinary citizens can face a short period in a zero-gravity environment while traveling long distances, for example between Britain and Australia.

Usually, flights from London to Sydney using commercial aircraft take more than 22 hours, but suborbital flights will cut this time to just two hours. This exceeds the record set by Concorde in 1985. However, passengers will face heavy forces during takeoff and landing, while in the middle of a gravityless flight, they must keep their seat belts attached.

Travelers may also be directed to tilt their seats at launch and 'tighten their buttocks' when they come out and re-enter Earth's atmosphere.

According to a report from the Times, the British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has conducted research reviewing the effects of suborbital spaceflight on the human body.

Published in the journal Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance, the study found that most people can overcome suborbital spaceflight weights, despite potentially problematic physiological responses.

"Commercial suborbital space flights are now available for tourism and scientific research, and are ultimately expected to develop into the journey of very fast destination points, such as London-Sydney in less than 2 hours," Ryan Anderton, CAA's chief medical officer, quoted by DailyMail.

"Like airflight, a solid basic knowledge of aviation-related physiology is needed to provide medical information and maximize safe access to suborbital flights. Suborbital acceleration profiles can generally be tolerated, but cannot be taken physiologically lightly," added Anderton.

Dr. Ryan Anderton, CAA's chief medical chief for spaceflight, told the Times that this is "not science fiction" and will be "much faster than people think... of course in less than 10 years."

This follows reports stating that space tourists should be barred from having sex in space as we enter a new era of'space tourism' involving suborbital and orbital flights.

Suborbital flights are defined as flights that enter space but do not have enough speed to stay there, so suborbital vehicles return to Earth.