THE ULTIMATE TRIP
You're aboard a rocket, strapped in tight as the countdown ticks off in your headset. At T-minus-two-seconds comes ignition, then the powerful rumble of engines at full throttle. The takeoff pins you to your seat. You accelerate to the speed of sound, twice that, three times. In a few minutes your vessel reaches a height of a hundred kilometers and touches the outer edge of the atmosphere. You can see the arc of your world below, a delicate curvature enveloped by a surprisingly thin, translucent blue halo. Above is cold blackness. Suddenly, you're weightless. You're in space.
Soon such flights will be available to anyone with physical stamina and the financial resources to buy a ticket. More than 20 small companies are currently building spaceships. Through booking agents, they are selling advance tickets to well-heeled customers. If you've got $5 million to invest in Rotary Rocket, you might be able to go as early as next year. A $1 million investment in Vela Technology Development offers a similar possibility. In three to four years there's a good chance that anyone with a spare $100,000 can buy a ticket on a rocket ship.
Until recently, private space travel has been dogged by a lack of capital rather than technology. Now the money is starting to trickle in, enough to help lift a half-dozen space tourism companies off the ground. Encouraged by demand from wealthy individuals who want to take the ultimate trip, private investors are beginning to make sizable bets on space tourism. Richard Garriott, 38, a son of the Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott and a software developer who made $30 million building Origin Systems, has put down a five-figure deposit with the booking agent Space Adventures in Arlington, Virginia, to secure a good place in line. "I've been to the South Pole and the bottom of the ocean," he declares. "The only direction left is up."
Space Adventures' main business now is taking thrill-seekers to the edge of space in Cold War-era MiG fighter jets (FORBES GLOBAL, July 26, 1999). But Eric Anderson, who runs the company, says he has collected 128 refundable deposits of $6,000 each toward the $98,000 price of a space trip. Another 11 prospective astronauts have paid in full up front. Anderson's brochure advertises that regular liftoffs will start as early as 2003. That may prove optimistic, but customers include Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Dole Food and First USA, all of which hope to use space trips as contest prizes. Another booker, Incredible Adventures of Sarasota, Florida, is also taking deposits, of $5,000; it, too, is aiming for 2003.
Who's going to carry the space tourists? Not NASA. Nor Boeing or Lockheed-Martin--they're more interested in their joint partnership with NASA, called United Space Alliance, to develop the next-generation Shuttle. Other governments with proven space technology, including France and China, are too busy launching military and commercial satellites. Russia may eventually provide trips to space for tourists, but right now it's strapped for cash.
For the next few decades, space tourism is likely to be handled by entrepreneurial rocketeers like Gary Hudson. A 30-year veteran of the space industry and a former consultant to NASA, General Dynamics and Boeing, Hudson started Rotary Rocket, based in Mojave, California, in 1996. Tom Clancy, the thriller writer, has invested $1 million. "I've known Gary for ten years, and I think he can do it," says Clancy.
Hudson has hired Burt Rutan, the designer and builder of Voyager, the first aircraft to circle the globe without refueling. "Burt is not a guy who fails," says Clancy. Hudson is offering free test rides to big investors in his company. One who has shown an interest is Richard Branson, the British billionaire who founded Virgin Air. He has already declared his intention of launching what could be the world's first commercial space service, Virgin Galactic Airways, by 2007.
A 1997 joint NASA/Space Transport Association study predicts that there will be a private space-tourism industry, $10 billion to $20 billion a year, by 2010. Before then, there is the X Prize, created in 1996 by Peter Diamandis, an aviation enthusiast and founder of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. Echoing the $25,000 Orteig Prize that spurred Charles Lindbergh to fly across the Atlantic in 1927, the X Prize promises $10 million to the first privately funded group to take a pilot plus the weight equivalent of two passengers to a suborbital height of 100 kilometers, bring him back safely and repeat the feat, using the same vehicle, within two weeks. So far 17 teams from five countries have entered the competition. Diamandis, who lives in St. Louis, Missouri, has raised half of the prize money.
The X Prize recognizes that in space tourism's early stages, you're not likely to see golfers teeing off on the moon, as Alan Shepard did on his second space trip in 1971. Instead, the first tourists are likely to do something similar to what Shepard did on his first trip in 1961--fly a 15-minute suborbital parabola topping out at 188 kilometers above the earth. This would offer a great view, a few minutes of weightlessness and invaluable bragging rights--assuming that the passenger makes it back.
What about full orbital flight? This requires rockets that can fly at 28,000kilometers an hour, fast enough to enter orbit. That, and the fiery business of reentry into the atmosphere, means that orbital space tourism is still seven to ten years away.
