Galactic Adventures Page 13
The Big Bucks
Here are the current price tags for a mission to space. Start saving!
• Sub-orbital flight (six minutes of weightlessness): US$200,000.
• Ten days on the International Space Station: US$35 million.
• Mission to the moon: US$100 million.
Getting There
Training
Your journey beyond our planet won’t come easy, though. The training in Galactic Adventures is based on the real training methods for civilian space travellers or space tourists. The centrifuge, the Vomit Comet, the vestibular chair, the fitness training and medical tests are all part of the civilian space program. Survival training is also taught: space school participants are dropped into a remote part of Russia and must be able to survive for two days and two nights using only equipment that they find in their spacecraft. Could you do that?
Spacecraft
Inspiration, imagination and wonder are driving our journey to the stars but it has taken the development of new kinds of spacecraft to make those dreams a reality.
In Galactic Adventures there is a mothership and a rocket plane. The mothership piggybacks the rocket plane up to 18,000 metres before the rocket plane launches. Launching a rocket plane from the air rather than the ground makes the craft lighter because it doesn’t have to carry as much fuel and all the ground-launch equipment. It also saves on the cost of fuel and rocket boosters, making space travel more affordable.
Orbit vs Sub-Orbit
Sub-orbital spaceflight means journeying into space but without orbiting (travelling around) the earth. Sub-orbital spaceflight means travelling above the edge of space, known as the Kármán Line, 100 kilometres above earth’s sea level. However, to actually get into orbit around earth, the spacecraft needs to travel high and fast enough to cancel out the pull of earth’s gravity. For a stable, long-term low-earth orbit you need to be around 350 kilometres up! Orbiting the earth requires a lot more speed, fuel and energy than a sub-orbital flight.
Space Holidays versus the Environment
Is space tourism an environmental monster, burning and belching fossil fuels out into the atmosphere? Hopefully not. The leaders in the civilian space travel revolution say that we are experiencing a new, ‘greener’ age for space travel. Cleaner fuels are being developed that will have the potential to be used in regular planes. Also, the new-style spacecraft are reusable unlike traditional rockets. And they won’t just be for fun. They will be used to carry out scientific experiments in microgravity and to deepen our understanding of earth’s upper atmosphere.
Space tourism company Virgin Galactic says on its website that to launch into sub-orbit, ‘emissions per passenger, per trip, will be approximately 0.8 tonnes – less than a one-way flight from London to New York’.
Danger Alert
Space stations have always been riddled with problems: loss of oxygen, onboard fires, extinguishers failing and computers crashing. In 1997 the Mir Space Station had a cargo spaceship crash into it, sending the station into a slow spin and making the onboard air pressure plummet. Cosmonauts quickly closed off the hatch separating that part of the space station from the rest and narrowly avoided disaster.
Your Life in Space
If you make it through space school your life will be turned upside down. Literally. Here are some things to start getting used to . . .
• In space, even going to the toilet is a challenge. For starters, you need to wear a seatbelt so you don’t float away halfway through. And remember to switch the vacuum on so that whatever you do goes down instead of up. One space tourist on the International Space Station forgot to turn the vacuum on and the results weren’t pretty.
• You can forget about baths in space: the water floats away. You’ll need to sponge yourself down and then wash your hair with a special kind of shampoo that doesn’t need rinsing!
• When you go to bed, remember to tuck yourself in . . . with Velcro straps. If you’re not tied down you might sleep-float across the spacecraft.
Quiz
Are you ready for space? Do you have the Right Stuff? Did you read the fiction and non-fiction parts of this book carefully? Try this quiz and test your space IQ.
1) According to Zarif in Chapter 8, what percentage of space travellers have died in operations or training?
a) None
b) About 5%
c) 35%
d) 104%
2) On a space station, do you drink your own wee?
a) Yes. You just wee straight into a glass and guzzle it down.
b) No. You’re not allowed to wee on the space station. You have to hold it in until you get back to earth.
c) Yes. Your wee gets filtered and purified and then it is ready for drinking.
d) No. Wee is disgusting.
3) How high above earth’s sea level is the Kármán line, the official boundary of space?
a) One metre
b) One kilometre
c) 100 kilometres
d) One million kilometres
4) How old was the youngest person in space to-date?
a) Zero: A baby was recently born on the International Space Station.
b) 12
c) 23
d) 32
5) What is the difference between orbit and sub-orbit?
a) Orbit means going into space while sub-orbit is travelling around the earth.
b) Sub-orbit means going into space while orbit means travelling around the earth.
c) Nothing. They are both the same.
d) Orbit is a chewing gum while Sub-orbit is a softdrink.
6) In space, what do the three letters EVA stand for?
a) Extra-vehicular Activity.
b) Emma, Vanessa and Audrey, the first three women in space.
c) Easy Vestibular Acupuncture, a cure for many common space-related illnesses.
d) Extra-terrestrial Vampire Association.
7) Who is Dennis Tito?
a) The first person to set foot on the moon.
b) The first paying space tourist.
c) The first human in space.
d) The first human to ride a horse in space.
8) In space training, what is the Vestibular Chair used for?
a) To make you vomit.
b) To help you deal with motion sickness.
c) To help you deal with the pressure on your body that you will experience when you rocket in and out of earth’s atmosphere.
d) To make you feel dizzy and crash into stuff when you stand up, making other people laugh.
9) In the simulator, Dash does a ballistic re-entry into earth’s atmosphere. What is a ‘ballistic re-entry’?
a) An uncontrolled re-entry where passengers experience ten times regular earth gravity on their bodies.
b) A ‘sick’ or ‘awesome’ re-entry.
c) A backwards re-entry where passengers experience two times the regular earth gravity on their bodies.
d) A re-entry that’s faster than the speed of light and makes frogs rain down from the ozone layer and land on people’s cars.
10) The Space Island Project aims to build space stations and space hotels out of:
a) Hollowed-out meteors.
b) Used solar panels.
c) Used fuel tanks.
d) Alien skins.
Answers:
1. b
2. c
3. c
4. d
5. b
6. a
7. b
8. b
9. a
10. c
1–3 correct: Maybe just stick to earth for n
ow. Try reading Galactic Adventures again and ramp up your space know-how.
4–7 correct: Astronaut-to-be. You’re so close you can smell space.
8–10 correct: Just go now. You know more about space than most astronauts.
Hope you’ve enjoyed the adventure.
See you in space,
Some Websites Worth Checking Out
www.space.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism
www.virgingalactic.com
www.spaceadventures.com
www.spacefuture.com
Also, try googling ‘NASA Kids Club’
Author Note
When I was seven years old I built a spaceship with my friend, Luke. It was made out of chipboard and u-nails and we planned to attach an outboard motor to get us into space. One of my strongest memories of childhood was, on my first day of year 6, watching the space shuttle Challenger disaster on TV. Then, as an adult, one of the greatest days of my life was visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida – so filled with hope and possibility. The first book I ever wrote was about space stations. I’ve always been fascinated by space travel and I can’t wait for the day that I am looking back at earth from high, high above. Then my journey will be complete.
Or maybe it will just be the beginning . . .
Special Thanks
To Alexis, the French fighter pilot, who I met by chance and who was very generous in sharing his training experiences.
Tom Wolfe, for writing The Right Stuff.
E Young’s book, The Astronaut’s Survival Guide, an excellent reference source.
The first space tourists for sharing their stories online in blogs, photos and video.
Richard Branson, Burt Rutan, the X Prize founders and the revolutionaries of modern space travel.
Kristina Schulz and Mark Macleod for their sage editorial advice.
Space, just for being there. For making us wonder. For being unknown.
My amazing wife, Amber and two extraordinary boys, Huxley and Luca, also just for being there. For making me wonder. For being unknown.
First published 2011 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
© Tristan Bancks 2011
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset in 12/16.5 pt Sabon by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
Internal illustrations by Aileen Lord
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Bancks, Tristan.
Galactic adventures: First Kids in Space / Tristan Bancks.
978 0 7022 3869 7 (pbk.)
978 0 7022 4706 4 (epub)
978 0 7022 4707 1 (kindle)
978 0 7022 4705 7 (pdf)
For primary school age.
1. Interplanetary voyages – Juvenile fiction.
2. Space flight – Juvenile fiction.
A823.4
University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.