Russian company plans to send tourists into space without space suits

Science & Space October 10, 2019, 13:15

The CosmoCourse company is currently working on redundancy systems, the director general said

MOSCOW, October 10./TASS/. The Russian CosmoCourse company, which is developing private space tourism in Russia, is planning to send its tourists into short sub-orbital space flights without space suits, company’s Director General Pavel Pushkin said on Thursday.

"We have sent materials to Roscosmos [on the planned flights] in which no space suite are featured," Pushkin said.

He said the state space corporation had "no concrete comments" on them, but requested additional calculations and details that specialists were ready to produce. In general, the tourists making space flights must have enough air from the Earth intended for the case of potential leaks.

The company is currently working on redundancy systems, he said. CosmoCourse’s foreign analogues - Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, - are also planning flights without space suits, Pushkin said.

CosmoCourse is designing a re-usable craft for sub-orbital tourist flights. It is expected to get to an altitude of 200 kilometers above Earth during a 15-minute-flight, which enough to say that its occupants have been in space (according to the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the outer space begins at an altitude of 100 kilometers). The company plans to build its own launch pad in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

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