Did NASA create a new adventure sport

Did NASA create a new adventure sport

Space tourism will be a reality within the next 20 years or sooner. Passenger spaceships will take you on a trip to the moon, around the Earth's orbit or beyond. But getting there is only half the fun, according to a company called Orbital Outfitters. has invented the most extreme sport ever, as well as the first ever space sport: space diving. This will entail skydiving from high above the Earth's atmosphere all the way back down to the surface.

The company is working to develop the necessary equipment that would make a planetary dive possible (and also safe), aiming for an openforbusiness date of ten years from now. The company's first major hurdle (which they had hoped to demonstrate in 2009) is to break the current world skydiving record 108,200 feet (31,333 meters) by Col. Joe Kittinger in 1960 with a dive of 120,000 feet (36,576 meters). Their next big goal would be to attempt a 60mile (96.5kilometer), suborbital dive; but their ultimate aim is a dive from orbit.

Here's how it would work: A spacediver launches into space, harnessed into a holding area on the open deck of a passenger rocket wearing a stateoftheart spacesuit. Normally, skydivers undo their harnesses and hurl themselves out of an open plane at around 30,000 feet (9,144 meters). The spacediver would hurtle into the dark expanse of space at an altitude of 150 miles (241.4 kilometers). For comparison's sake, that's like jumping from Los Angeles and ending up in San Diego.

For the next seven minutes, the diver freefalls at speeds of up to 2,500 miles per hour (4,023 kilometers per hour). Once that threshold is reached, the diver's specially designed suit discharges a drogue chute (a parachute designed to slow the thing that's falling) in order to stabilize descent and fight the vacuumlike effects of space upon reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. At about 3,000 feet (914.4 meters) above the ground, when the inner atmosphere is reached, the falling speed drops to a relatively slow 120 miles per hour (193.1 kilometers per hour). Then, a conventional parachute opens, and the space traveler safely floats down to the ground.

In other words, the space diver is like a meteor hurtling through space and into Earth's atmosphere, except that most meteors burn up and break apart upon entry. That happening to a human being would be a major deterrent against the sport, but Jonathan Clark theorizes that it might not be a concern. He believes that proper protection, such as thermal coatings, a decent oxygen supply and an aerodynamic heat shield, would protect the diver. He also believes that the human body is too small to bust apart on reentry, as a meteor would [source: Popsci].