Sydney to London in two hours via space is possible: UK's Civil Aviation Authority

Travellers would be able to fly from Britain to Australia in less than two hours within the next decade by travelling through space, new research from a major aviation body suggests. The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority - which overseas and regulates aviation safety - funded a new medical study into the effects of suborbital space flights, where passengers would be briefly sent into space before descending to land at their destination. Suborbital flights, such as those offered by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, or and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin companies, currently cost more than $650,000 a seat. While so-called “A to B flights” differ from experimental space tourism, industry and regulators have forecast both forms of travel could become readily accessible by the mid-2030s. A flight would involve a high G-force rocket launch to an altitude of up to 100km, where the craft would reach space but not have the required speed to stay in the Earth’s orbit. The method of travel would mean journeys last only a fraction of the time taken by the current methods of aviation, with the flight time between the UK capital and Sydney usually around 22 hours or 19 hours direct from Perth or Darwin. In 1985, a British Airways Concorde flight set a record for the London to Sydney leg in just 17 hours, 3 minutes and 45 seconds - with refuelling stops in Bahrain, Colombo and Perth.<br/>