Why I’m in no rush for two-hour flights to Sydney
Suborbital flights could be available within a decade, speeding our travel round the world. But how exciting are they really? Chris Haslam, who has spent 20 years crossing the globe the slow way, reports
So much for slow travel. You may have spotted the news last week that we’ll be able to fly from London to Sydney in two hours by 2033. We’ll do so not by conventional jet power, but by travelling in the same way as an intercontinental ballistic missile — and, for once, rocket science seems simple. All we have to do is blast up through the Karman line — Earth’s final frontier, 62 miles up — and into space, then plunge through the all-but-frictionless void in a parabolic descent, before re-entering the atmosphere in a hypersonic glide to final approach and landing, presumably at a satellite terminal.
“The high-G blast-off always feels as if the cradles would rupture and spurt fluid all over the cabin,” Robert Heinlein wrote in eerily specific detail in his 1982 novel Friday. “The breathless minutes in free fall that feel as if your guts were falling out. And then re-entry, and that long, long glide that beats any sky ride ever built. We had lifted at North Island at noon Thursday, so we arrived 40 minutes later at Winnipeg the day before, in the early evening on Wednesday, 1940 hours.” He didn’t mention how long it took to retrieve his luggage.
It all sounds awfully glamorous, especially if you believe the fanciful renderings that have appeared over the years depicting beige-clad billionaires playing 3D chess beneath a crystal observation dome as their craft flashes through the darkness at a mile per second.
The truth seems light years away. The cabins on Sir Richard Branson’s Unity, which might or might not finally begin taking tourists on 90-minute joyrides this summer — and Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard look like Californian dental surgeries with wipe-clean surfaces. For that, and a few moments of weightlessness, you pay Virgin Galactic £360,000 and Blue Origin up to £24 million; you also get a personalised pair of overalls to keep.
But these novelties are to point-to-point suborbital space flight what a day out on an Athens superyacht is to an Aegean island ferry. Initially, like the early days of air travel, suborbital flights will be for the wealthy, but as the risks are reduced and the technology is scaled up the operating costs will shrink. Then, as the personalised overalls are discontinued, an alternative reality will emerge.
Advertisement
Discussing his Big Falcon Rocket project in 2017, Elon Musk suggested cramming 1,000 passengers into a pressurised cabin (for comparison, the maximum operating capacity of an A380 is 543). “All seats would be coach [with] no toilets, pilot area or food galley needed,” he tweeted. Fares would be determined by demand rather than destination, because distance would cease to be a significant metric, and one estimate suggests seat prices could start at £1,000.
But as the guinea pigs have discovered, space travel hurts. Suborbital flights typically involve pulling 3Gs at launch, then a brief period of weightlessness and a 6G phase on re-entry to the atmosphere. In layman’s terms that means a 12st man would effectively weigh 36st at blast-off, nothing at all for a short while and 72st on re-entry.
A Civil Aviation Authority study of the physiological effects of simulated suborbital space flight, published in the Journal of Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance in December, details the discomforts of the rocket man’s adventure. They include rapid elevation in heart rate and blood pressure; unpleasant chest heaviness and difficulty breathing; nausea and occasional vomiting; greyouts, momentary blackouts and, in extreme cases, G-force-induced loss of consciousness.
If you want a foretaste of future travel try the Tower of Terror rollercoaster at the Gold Reef City theme park in Johannesburg. One section involves free fall into a mine shaft in which you pull 6.3Gs and feel that your chest is being crushed. Luckily you only fall for three seconds; the sensation may last significantly longer during a suborbital re-entry.
You may also find that your legs aren’t beach ready. “After high-G flights, my arms and legs will have what appears to be chickenpox — blood has pooled in my extremities and caused the blood vessels to rupture,” the US air force fighter pilot Hasard Lee reported. “It’s similar to a bruise and usually dissipates within a few days.”
And don’t even try to think about the jet lag or how many hours you’ve gained or lost. Sooner or later, like it or not, it will take longer to get from your home to Heathrow than it will to fly from there to Sydney. By then, this newspaper may be publishing reports on day trips to Delhi, nights out in New Orleans and weekends in the West Indies.
It’s progress, but shrinking the world to the length of a cross-town bus trip is the next stage in eliminating the journey from travel. It erases experience for the sake of convenience, and whether you’re filthy rich or cattle class it leaves you spiritually and emotionally poorer.
Some say that the 22.5 hours it takes to reach Sydney from London is too long. For me it’s too short. It doesn’t seem right that we can reach a land on the other side of the planet in less than a day, nor that we can cross the Atlantic in the time it takes to watch two films.
Advertisement
Two decades of exploring the world for this newspaper has taught me that the wonder experienced in far-off lands is usually proportional to the effort expended in their attainment. Anyone who’s taken the train to Spain instead of the plane will agree. Easy access, on the other hand, propagates disdain. Would Machu Picchu be improved by a heliport or the Pennine Way by a monorail?
So on a weekend break in 2033 in what remains of the Maldives, as you compare travel notes over cocktails with that nice couple you met at the rocket terminal, you may reminisce on the cramped, litter-strewn economy cabins of yore, with their dreadful food, dismissive service, tiny seat-back screens and interminable journey times. And you’ll all agree that ever since British Airways went suborbital, the glamour has gone right out of travel.
Are you excited about the future of travel or would you rather travel more slowly? Let us know in the comments below
Sign up for our Times Travel newsletter and follow us on Instagram and Twitter
