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Houston (UPI) Oct 25, 2010
Two space tourism companies say the price for a trip into space could drop from millions of dollars down to hundreds of thousands by late 2011.
A brief trip into space featuring a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the earth 62 miles below could be within reach of the merely well-off and not just the mega-rich, the Houston Chronicle reported Monday.
"Now, the sky is no longer the limit," said Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group is one the companies planning to offer commercial suborbital missions late next year. "We will begin the process of pushing beyond to the final frontier of space itself."
Space Adventures, the Vienna, Va.-based company that brokered the flights of seven space tourists to the International Space Station between 2001 and 2009, also plans to offer suborbital tourist flights.
Both companies are expected to offer tickets at between $100,000 and $200,000, still a steep price for a flight lasting a few minutes.
"There's no magic wand out there to wave and reduce the cost of space access by a factor of 10 or 100," said Jeff Foust, a space industry analyst for the Futron Corp.
The big hope in space tourism, he said, is that once suborbital flights grow in demand ticket prices will drop.
"It's not going to be something where it's a $99 deal with Southwest," Foust said. "Relative to commercial air travel it will still be expensive. But people spend tens of thousands of dollars to climb Everest, visit Antarctica or go on African safaris. This price will attract adventure tourists."
www.space-travel.com
The advent of relatively “inexpensive,” privately developed,low-orbit space vehicles will lead to a burgeoning business in orbital space
ReplyDeletetourism by which thousands of people will pay tens of thousands of dollars (or
yen, yuan or euros, etc.) to take a ride around the earth and watch the sun
rise and set, all within a matter of two hours. Five-plus tons of “space
garbage” in orbit will prove a major hazard. Each tiny speck if it strikes a
spaceship can penetrate aluminum and kill someone inside the same as a bullet
fired from a high-powered rifle. If such an accident should occur, a PR
campaign should demonstrate that such flights—with newly added security
measures—are far safer than any other mode of transportation. The new NSRA
should undertake or organize an international program to sweep up the estimated
twenty thousand pieces of space garbage. That should effectively overcome any
temporary reluctance on the part of the public.
The spectacular success of the Russian nuclear engine will
facilitate true space tourism, i.e., excursions to the moon. The way in which
the moon will be so quickly commercialized will amaze people. Since we are
speculating as to how this might come about, bear with us as we brazenly
attempt to predict the future. The International Space Station (ISS) has cost
twelve times its original estimate and has produced little hard science to
date. It will be replaced by a laboratory with permanent living quarters on the
moon that will be much less costly to operate—as quickly as that lab becomes
feasible.
Therefore, most probably, the International Space
Station will be purchased by a consortium of private companies and adapted to
the task of transferring passengers to the nuclear-powered “Moonship.” It is
possible that the nuclear engine may not be allowed for manned Earth takeoff,
so it will need a docking waystation where passengers can be transferred from
efficient shuttles to the nuclear-powered moonship. From there it will be a
two-hour ride to a docking port at the elevator in orbit above the Mare
Crisium. If allowed, the nuclear moonship may depart directly from the surface
of the earth and land directly on the moon. A spaceport on the moon will be
less costly to operate than waystations.
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