Scientists Profit from Space Tourism

Private space tourism companies like Virgin will give researchers greater (and cheaper) access to outer space, allowing them to complete more experiments: “‘It’s almost impossible to get research on the space station at the moment,’ said Mark Shelhamer, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University medical school who would like to study people’s balance and other motor sensory abilities before and after suborbital flights. On Earth, gravity is the dominant force, and many common processes—the way that water boils, for instance, and that a flame burns—behave much differently without it.”