In Neil Armstrong Hall on the Purdue University campus, Dr. Steven Collicott's AAE 418 students are working on a semester-long project to design and build experiments to be conducted in microgravity. The course aims to give these aeronautical engineering students the hands-on experience they'll need when they join the workforce. The only problem is, most students in courses like these will never have the opportunity to actually fly their experiments. Flight opportunities today are too rare and too expensive, leaving all but a few student payloads as theoretical exercises. Within a few years, all that will change. The suborbital vehicles being built by XCOR and Virgin Galactic (VG) will not just be flying wealthy tourists to the edge of space. They will also be research platforms for academic and commercial customers who will eventually surpass the personal spaceflight market in volume and revenue.
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