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?
- A 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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