Customers of Starfighters learn to fly on F-104 fighters - they were trained by Neil Armstrong. With their help you can recreate the overload and microgravity, similar to those experienced by astronauts in rockets, writes Motherboard. Startup Starfighters creates the first commercial training program for astronauts. It is designed for space tourists who have booked themselves places on the rockets SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic or any other company that promises to send everyone to Earth orbit in the near future. To date, only Starfighters offers a highly qualified training program for non-professional cosmonauts. Private space companies do not have such programs, and NASA, by contrast, has the most demanding requirements for astronauts, and their preparation takes years. Customers Starfighters learn to fly on F-104 fighters - the same ones that trained Neil Armstrong and other cosmonauts of the Apollo era. F-104 was called a "rocket with a man inside": it can develop a speed that is twice the speed of sound, and under certain conditions in the cockpit you can recreate conditions close to what the astronauts experience on takeoff. "We believe that it will be wrong to send unprepared, but very rich people into space, and hope that they will somehow manage it by themselves," says Starfighters CEO Rick Svetkov.

Therefore, for $ 20 thousand for one flight, potential space tourists can feel the overload, similar to what the astronauts experience during take-off, as well as the state of weightlessness. In the future, Starfighters is going to expand the training program for astronauts, bringing it closer to NASA standards. So far, there are no certified methods at the state level for the preparation of space tourists for flights, and Svetkov hopes that in the development of the relevant legislation, its program will be based on.

Original article: Starfighters will prepare the first space tourists for flights.