May 16th - Will we use space travel to get to Australia?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 16 May 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Imagine a world where we can get from London to Sydney in two hours. It's a fantasy that the Civil Aviation Authority and the RAF have been working towards. The journey would involve space travel and sustaining a force of 6G on your body. One important thing to be sure of: whether humans could survive the journey. So, recently, a group of healthy participants between 30 and 80 years old were put under similar strains in a centrifuge. Thankfully everyone in the group survived. But does this mean we'll be zipping across the world in no time? Here's what I think.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 16th of May |
| 0:09.6 | and you might be very excited by the idea that within 10 years we'll be able to travel from London to Sydney |
| 0:17.9 | via space. Yes that is what reports are saying and they are based on some research |
| 0:26.0 | which the Civil Aviation Authority has been doing in association with the RAF who provided the |
| 0:32.9 | centrifuge and King's College London who were doing the study and Cranwell University, which is where that centrifuge is located. |
| 0:42.7 | Why do you need a centrifuge? Because this was all about how much ordinary civilians can withstand if they were to be in a spacecraft that went from London to Sydney or indeed |
| 0:59.0 | anywhere else across the world. And the idea is that once you get into sub-orbit, so maybe |
| 1:07.0 | 50 or 60 miles above the earth, where effectively there's no air and therefore you can move very, |
| 1:15.8 | very quickly because there's no friction. It's going to be quite an effort to get there and it's |
| 1:20.6 | going to be quite an effort to get back. While you're up in space, you'll be able to move extremely |
| 1:25.1 | quickly, which is very convenient if you've got a long way to |
| 1:28.5 | travel and what they concluded was that well it probably won't kill you the g forces when you are |
| 1:37.2 | going up into well near space are 4g and when you're coming down they're 6g so that's 4 and 6 times respectively the normal |
| 1:48.1 | force of gravity those are extraordinary numbers because well even on a theme park and nobody loves |
| 1:57.2 | theme park rides more than me you are not going to get to those areas. |
| 2:02.9 | And they said, well, you're going to have all sorts of things from rising heart rate, not surprised. |
| 2:08.5 | And blood pressure, I'm not surprised. |
| 2:10.4 | Dipping blood oxygen, graying out of peripheral vision. |
| 2:14.2 | And one participant, and these were a group of healthy people thank goodness for that |
| 2:21.6 | and they still are healthy the idea is that um you one of them blacked out but the idea is |
| 2:28.7 | a 24 healthy people aged from their early 30s to the age of 80, um, survived. Now, this is very good news and I think |
| 2:38.3 | it's perfectly worthwhile research, but the stories then sort of say, well, of course, so there's |
... |
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