Imagine getting the chance to take a vacation in space: you pack your bags, launch into the sky and find yourself floating among a sea of stars.
Now imagine having an unexpected allergic reaction. Suddenly you’re hundreds of miles above the Earth, wheezing, itching with puffy eyes and no medication in sight.
“Are you going to wait two months for SpaceX’s next rocket to get you the Benadryl?” asks Sarah Safari.
“No, you need it now.”
That’s part of the pitch Safari made at the opening of what’s billed as Canada’s first missile factory. As part of a husband-and-wife team, Safari and Sohrab Haghighat spoke to News at the headquarters of their company SpaceRyde just north of Toronto in Vaughan, Ontario, alongside the first Canadian astronaut to live aboard the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield.
Their goal: to make history as the first orbital rocket to be launched from a balloon — meaning lower costs and on-demand access to space. Think of a private Uber-like service for freight “from the Earth to the Moon and everywhere in between,” they say.
Safari and Haghighat envision taking cargo to the edge of space by balloon, then releasing it, igniting a rocket and using the power of miniature computers to determine where they go in space.
An ‘elegant idea’, says Hadfield
At a price tag of $250,000 per trip, it’s a fraction of the cost of what’s currently being offered for a company or entity looking to send satellites into space or take cargo to the moon, Safari says. The competition, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, charges more than $1.1 million in comparison, she says.
It’s an “elegant idea,” said Hadfield, who says reaching space has now been achieved through the “brute force” of burning massive amounts of fossil fuels.
“It’s a physics problem,” he said during Tuesday’s press conference. “To get into orbit, you have to go five miles per second. If you slow down, you’ll fall into the air; if you go faster, you’ll go to a higher orbit.”
“But there’s too much friction,” he said. “So you have to get above the sky and then you have to go fast enough to stay up there.”
Applications here on earth
That’s where the balloons come in.
But the technology isn’t just useful for space travelers who may have forgotten something important on Earth, Hadfield says. It also has the potential to make it easier to send satellites into low Earth orbit to return valuable information about the health and temperature of the oceans and the planet as a whole, he says.
Jason Wood, executive director of space exploration and space industry policy at the Canadian Space Agency, envisions other uses as well.
“Think about how that can help remote or northern communities here in Canada to provide sustainable food sources, or another example is health care, in terms of remote medicine.”
Wood says SpaceRyde is part of a larger shift to more and more commercial players providing access to space. By some estimates, the industry is expected to grow to $1 trillion a year by 2040, he says.
As for Safari and Haghighat, the two met in Waterloo, Ont. during graduation.
“That’s where we met and we fell in love and eventually we got married,” he told News.
The couple, who have been married for nearly 14 years, are planning their first launch in 2023.
The following year, they set their sights on the moon.
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