Sub-orbital spaceflight creates more opportunity for space exploration

ST. JOSEPH COUNTY, Ind-- Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have not only opened the door for commercial space flights in the future, but they’ve created a whole new avenue for researchers and scientists to learn more about space.

“I don’t want people to overlook is that the tourism industry has created marvelous research laboratories for us,” Purdue University professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Steven Collicott said.

According to experts, commercial flights to space could be available as soon as next year. Even though it’s too soon to tell what impact space tourism will have on people like us, Steven Collicott at Purdue University said it's already proving to have major scientific impact.

Both, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic were able to carry out some experiments before flights officially took off. Professor Collicott at Purdue University has already flown seven automated experiments for the Blue Origin Flights. He said he works in aerospace on the control of liquid rocket propellants in space flight in orbit and needs a zero-gravity laboratory, which this provided. He’s excited about what we could learn from these flights.

"That's what this gives me. Other people are studying biology, the reaction of biological systems to weightlessness. Others are studying the atmosphere up there the mesosphere and lower thermosphere that these vehicles fly into. There’s little very known about these regions of the atmosphere,” Collicott said.
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Collicott said Blue Origin has a program for schools K-12 to learn more about space travel. Check it out here