Flight Duration
In a vertical flight of not too high altitudes, the time of the free-fall is both for the upward and for the downward part the maximum speed divided by the acceleration of gravity, so with a maximum speed of 1 km/s together 3 minutes and 20 seconds. The duration of the flight phases before and after the free-fall can vary.
For an intercontinental flight the boost phase takes 3 to 5 minutes, the free-fall (midcourse phase) about 25 minutes. For an ICBM the atmospheric reentry phase takes about 2 minutes; this will be longer for any soft landing, such as for a possible future commercial flight.
Suborbital flights can last many hours. Pioneer 1 was NASA's first space probe, intended to reach the Moon. A partial failure caused it to instead follow a suborbital trajectory, reentering the Earth's atmosphere 43 hours after launch.
Read more about this topic: Sub-orbital Spaceflight
Famous quotes containing the words flight and/or duration:
“When the flight is not high the fall is not heavy.”
—Chinese proverb.
“What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)