Wellness

NEW ATMOSPHERES TO CLEAR YOUR HEAD

If you’d like a break from mere earthly atmosphere, you can book a flight to beautiful atmospheres beyond. You’ve got two cool options to go up, up, and away, thanks to recent developments by Virgin Galactic and SpaceX.

Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s foray into space travel, has made great strides in developing the technology to make this possible.

The SpaceShipTwo, a newly designed ship capable of carrying two pilots and six passengers, successfully completed its third supersonic test flight this past January. This means that it could be ready to travel as soon as this year.

Sign up, and you can join the more than 600 people who are set to fly to suborbital space aboard SpaceShipTwo, at the current price of $250,000 per seat.

Virgin Galactic operates out of Spaceport America, in New Mexico.

SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced rockets and spacecraft. Virgin Galactica is its hanger-mate at spaceport America.

The company, founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, aims to revolutionize space transportation, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.

The SpaceX spaceship, named Dragon, took a monumental trip in 2012, becoming the first commercial aircraft to successfully bring cargo to the International Space Station and back. Now, they’ve got the Falcon 9 and 9R, reusable rockets, which change the game again.

SpaceX has big dreams of interplanetary travel. Watch above as Musk discusses the possibility of travel to Mars. Of course, atmosphere is a big issue here, but lots of progress has been made to help humans manage.

SpaceX recently unveiled its Dragon Version 2 spacecraft, capable of carrying up to seven crewmembers to astral atmospheres. It can land propulsively almost anywhere on Earth, “with the landing precision of a helicopter." And it can refuel and fly again for rapid reusability. This makes interplanetary trips possible now that they are no longer constrained by ocean landings.

Check out this super-cool video of the Dragon 2 taking off, docking, and touching down. It is so science fiction... except, it’s not!

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Atmosphere in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 06.29.14. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!

PHOTO CREDITS:

Photo: Courtesy of XCOR. Lynx Spacecraft.
Photo: Courtesy of Scaled Composites. SpaceshipTwo.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo space plane rockets through the stratosphere at 71,000 feet.
Photo: Courtesy of Spaceport America. Virgin Galactic and SpaceX’s combination hanger and terminal, part of Spaceport America.
Photo: Courtesy of SpaceX. Falcon 9 and Dragon Launching to Space.
Photo: Courtesy of SpaceX. Dragon.
Photo: Courtesy of SpaceX. Dragon 2 Unveiling.
Photo: Courtesy of SpaceX. Dragon2 Interior.
Photo: Courtesy of SpaceX. Dragon2 in Flight.