…or maybe just a little. This is what can happen if the rocket does not use any engine for first 36 km of its travel towards the sky. The question that might have just come up in your mind is – Seriously, how can a rocket travel 36 km without engines? The answer is easier than you can imagine – it will use balloon.
Zero 2 Infinity has developed technology allowing rockets travel the most energy/oil consuming part of the travel to be done with a much lower usage of those resources. The process they have came up with looks simple, the rocket is being taken by a parachute for the latitude of 36/38km and at this point engines start working and take the rocket to its final desired destination. Thank to the process the rocket is much smaller (reasons for that are described below) and with less wait it automatically consumes less oil and is easier to be controlled.
Yet oil/energy, is the only resources saved thanks to the usage of a enormous balloon instead of engines. Many parts of the rocket are irrelevant when the rocket does not have to get through the most dense environment with its highest speed, but is going through it in a slow piece af a balloon. Vast majority of the pieces which a standard rocket composes of are protection tools, and they are not needed anymore, because frictional force of achieving the latitude of 36/38km is decreased significantly. Many other parts are there only for the sake of storing the oil, and they are irrelevant as well, as the amount of oil burned during flight is much lower than in a normal rocket. All this reasons/efficiency enhancements are leading to significant drop of the cost of travelling to space.
As many other areas of research space exploration is lacking one particularly important resource – money, and Zero 2 Infinity is one of the steps to deal with this issue. Thanks to cutting costs of putting the rocket on the orbit, there is a possibility to conduct such flights with a higher frequency, which would lead to increased number of research project conducted, eventually giving more than usually scientific results/discoveries – being a great start to reach for even more public/private funds to develop cosmos further and broader. Additionally private space travels can be made more available to regular humans (maybe those a bit better-off, but not the astronauts only), and with the scale always come more money, possibilities and solutions.
If implemented on a big enough scale, Zero 2 Infinity can be a quantum jump in the development of space travel.
We need this kind of technology in order not to produce as much of a space waste as we do. It is a great invention but if big companies like NASA or SpaceX won’t be interested in it then it probably won’t play a great part in the space industry.