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By March 2011, Virgin Galactic had submitted SpaceShipTwo as a reusable launch vehicle for carrying research payloads in response to NASA's suborbital reusable launch vehicle (sRLV) solicitation, which was a part of the agency's Flight Opportunities Program. Virgin projected research flights might reach a peak altitude of 110 km (68 mi).
Some sub-orbital flights have been undertaken to test spacecraft and launch vehicles later intended for orbital spaceflight. Other vehicles are specifically designed only for sub-orbital flight; examples include crewed vehicles, such as the X-15 and SpaceShipTwo, and uncrewed ones, such as ICBMs and sounding rockets.
The Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle, designed for NASA's Project Mercury, was the first American crewed space booster.It was used for six sub-orbital Mercury flights from 1960–1961; culminating with the launch of the first, and 11 weeks later, the second American (and the second and third humans) in space.
It was the first crewed flight of Project Mercury. The project had the ultimate objective of putting an astronaut into orbit around the Earth and returning him safely. Shepard's mission was a 15-minute suborbital flight with the primary objective of demonstrating his ability to withstand the high g-forces of launch and atmospheric re-entry. [1]
Suborbital test flights Launch site(s) Dates of flight LEO GTO Other First Latest Starship Block 1 [140] United States: SpaceX: 121 m 40,000 – 50,000 [141] N/A N/A Reusable: 0 6 Starbase: 2023 2024 Angara A5 / Orion Russia: Khrunichev: 54.9 m N/A 6,500 [142] 3,700 to GEO [142] Expendable: 1 [142] Plesetsk, Vostochny: 2024 2024 Angara A5 ...
An orbital spaceflight (or orbital flight) is a spaceflight in which a spacecraft is placed on a trajectory where it could remain in space for at least one orbit. To do this around the Earth , it must be on a free trajectory which has an altitude at perigee (altitude at closest approach) around 80 kilometers (50 mi); this is the boundary of ...
Mercury flight history; X-15 flight history (altitudes given in feet) Gemini flight history; Apollo flight history (student resource) Skylab flight history; Apollo-Soyuz flight history; Space Shuttle flight history infographic; Shenzhou flight history timeline; SpaceShipOne flight history; Soyuz MS-10 flight details; VSS Unity flight details
The delta-v requirements for sub-orbital spaceflight are much lower than for orbital spaceflight. For the Ansari X Prize altitude of 100 km, Space Ship One required a delta-v of roughly 1.4 km/s. To reach the initial low Earth orbit of the International Space Station of 300 km (now 400 km), the delta-v is over six times higher, about 9.4 km/s.