Where are you taking your vacation this year? California? Hawaii? Europe? How about outer space? For those with the money and the nerve this will soon be the destination.

Some have already been there: billionaires such as Dennis Tito have paid to spend time outside the Earth’s atmosphere. In 2001 Tito climbed into a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and with two cosmonauts for company was blasted up to the International Space Station where he enjoyed six days on the world’s first space vacation.

The company that sent Tito into space, Space Adventures, has since taken six more tourists into orbit. The latest, Richard Garriott, the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, made history during his mission by becoming the first second- generation astronaut.

Over the next decade Space Adventures is looking to dramatically increase its activities and plans to fly more people into space than have made the journey since the dawn of the Space Age. The company’s flagship program is the first private manned mission to the moon, a circumlunar trip that will use a combination of existing and flight tested Russian technology. These experiences do not come cheap, how- ever: each of the existing space tourists has reportedly paid around $20 million for the privilege of reaching space, whereas the price of being part of the mission to the moon is likely to be $100 million.

Yet commercial space travel promises not to be the preserve of the super rich for much longer. In September 2004, British entrepre- neur Richard Branson set up Virgin Galactic to cater for those of us who want to try the space experience at a relatively affordable price. At the launch Sir Richard said, “I hope, with the launch of Virgin Galactic and the building of our fleet of spacecraft, that one day children around the world will wonder why we ever thought that space travel was a dream we read about in books.”

Virgin recently announced that it had reached an historic agreement with New Mex- ico to build a $200 million spaceport, “Space- port America,” on a 27 square mile patch of desert in the south of the state. New Mexico was chosen because it has several factors that make it an ideal operations base: climate, free airspace, low population density, high altitude, and stunning scenery. From here the first Vir- gin spacecraft, Space Ship Two (SS2), will blast off into orbit sometime in 2010.

Virgin foresees its first space tourists under- going six days of training before being ready to go. This will include medical preparation, G- force training and classes led by space experts and former astronauts.

Passengers will then be ready for the trip of a lifetime. Equipped to carry six passengers and two pilots, SS2 will launch from under a mother ship that will take the spacecraft to 10 miles above sea level before releasing it. The craft will then accelerate to 4G and leave the Earth’s atmosphere while passengers watch as the color changes from sky blue to the endless blackness of space. Once there, SS2 will cut its engines and let the amateur astronauts on board marvel at the beauty of the planet they have left behind and the solar system that sur- rounds it, before returning to Earth and gliding back down to the spaceport.

The price of this amazing trip will be $200,000, with a minimum deposit of $20,000 to reserve your seat. Expensive? Sure, but this is the price of being a pioneer; as technology advances and competitors enter the market the price will fall and the number of space tourists will rise. Entrepreneurs such as Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos and Paypal founder Elon Musk are both reported to be involved in plans for their own commercial space flight ventures. Space tourism will not stop at simple day trips into space. Now that it is possible to take paying customers into orbit, the concept of a whole vacation in space has become feasible. If people plan to spend their vacations in space they will need somewhere to stay, and companies such as Hilton Hotels are already looking at how to cater to those wanting to book a room with a truly spectacular view.

In fact, international hotel architects Wimberley Allison Tong & Goo (WATG) have already designed a space hotel made of redundant space-shuttle fuel tanks. Each of these tanks is 154 feet long and 27 feet wide; they would be converted to provide luxury accommodation for several people. They would then be linked up to make an Earth-orbiting space hotel, traveling about 200 miles above the planet; an orbit known as “low Earth.” The space hotel will accommodate 100 people as it orbits the Earth, and guests will be ferried to and from the resort by the next genera- tion of space shuttles. The complex—a cross between a theme park and a cruise ship— promises to be luxury in space. The company is already working on providing guests experi- ences such as tethered space walks and trips around the moon.

“It’s exciting to design an environment in this new, vast, and wonderful frontier,” says Howard J. Wolff, senior vice president of WATG, “but the point will be to strike a balance between creating an out-of-this-world experience and providing some creature comforts and safety measures that travelers have come to expect in other destination resorts.”

Perhaps the current leader in the field of space vacations is Bigelow Aerospace, owned by Rob- ert Bigelow, boss of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain. He is pouring $500 million of his personal fortune into a project to make inflatable Earth-orbiting modules, which could eventually become space hotels. The technology has been inherited from NASA’s inflatable TransHab project, which aimed to provide more room for live-in crews of the International Space Station and for Moon and Mars dwellers in the future. NASA’s project was terminated due to technical problems, escalating costs and congressional pressure.

Bigelow was able to come to a deal with NASA and paid a substantial sum to acquire the sole rights to commercial development of the inflatable space module concept. Bigelow Aerospace has already successfully blasted two test craft into space, Genesis I and II, which are testing and validating the technologies necessary to construct and deploy a full-scale, crewed, commercial orbital space complex. This will enable the company’s scientists to iron out any faults before a much larger habitat, called the Nautilus, is sent into space.

The cost of an actual vaca- tion in space is likely to be prohibitive a round-trip with a one-night stay in Big- elow’s space hotel is expected to cost around $8 million. This is because of the high cost of the transportation craft and the small number of passengers that can be taken on any one trip.

Even this problem could soon be solved, however, thanks to a concept straight out of science fiction books the space elevator. This is a device that could haul objects from a point on earth up a cable to an orbiting station in space. It sounds unbelievable, but the science behind it is perfectly sound. Renowned science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who featured space elevators in his novel The Fountains of Paradise, once said that the first space elevator would be built 50 years after everyone stopped laughing.

No one is laughing now. Dr. Brad Edwards, director of the Californian-based Spaceward Foundation, has designed an elevator that begins with a thin ribbon anchored to an offshore platform near the equator and attached to a counterweight sixty-two thousand miles above the Earth’s surface. The ribbon would be about three feet wide, thinner than a sheet of paper, and made out of a very strong material called carbon-nanotube composite. The ribbon would hold steady due to the rotation of the earth the way you might spin a ball on the end of a piece of string and pull on its anchor with a force of twenty tons. Vehicles called climbers would ascend into the atmosphere at 120 mph using electricity generated by solar panels and a ground-based booster light beam. The anchor platform could move around to protect the ribbon from any or- biting space junk and would be heavily guarded to protect it from sabotage. If this design could be put into practice, the possibilities for space tourism would become absolutely huge.

Large-scale space tourism is no longer just a dream of science fiction writers: it is fast becoming a reality. Perhaps it will not be long before we can all have the chance of experiencing what led astronaut Gus Grissom to write these words: “There is a clarity, a brilliance to space that simply doesn’t exist on earth, even on a cloudless summer’s day in the Rockies…nowhere else can you realize so fully the majesty of our Earth and be so awed at the thought that it’s only one of untold thousands of planets.”

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

CAPTCHA Code (required)