Well, who knows? My Grandma (god rest her soul) was born just before the first heavier than air flight in 1904, yet lived well into the era of cheap heavier than air flight (she died this year just shy of her 97th birthday). I was born two years before Yuri Gagarin went up, and I’m still a young man. The shuttle is only 20 years old after all. When my grandma was my age, jets were still an experimental technology. Keep your fingers crossed.
Okay, so I can plunk down $98,000 for a ticket to “space,” in the guise of a sub-orbital flight. Forget that the flight doesn’t actually go into space; forget that you get just 2.5 minutes of stomach-churning weightlessness. Just sing it with me (as my brain does whenever I consider this scheme):
a three-hour cruise
a three-hour cruise
A link to the column is appreciated. When will average people be able to afford commercial space flight?
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Cecil mentions the training aircraft used for parabolic weightless flights is nicknamed the “Vomit Comet”. This is true. However, I don’t know that a one-shot suborbital parabolic path would be that nauseating. Why so?
The KC-135 (Vomit Comet) flies multiple parabolas - on the order of 80 to 100 in a row, no breaks. That is a sequential alteration of zero-g for going over the top of the parabola, then a rapid change to 2-g for pulling out of the parabola (the bottom of the flight). It is the cycle from 0 to 2 to 0 again that gets the stomach churning, rather than just one change from 1-g to 0-g and back.
So, Irishman, what you’re saying is that big jerks make astronauts sick? Just like the rest of us, I suppose…
Firm Books 100 Future Flights to Space
By MATTHEW BARAKAT
.c The Associated Press
ARLINGTON, Va. (May 5) - When space tourist Dennis Tito returns to Earth on Sunday, plenty of others will be lined up to take his place.
Arlington-based Space Adventures, which helped Tito broker the reported $20 million deal to buy a ride on a Russian spacecraft, says it has several serious customers willing to pay tens of millions of dollars for a trip into outer space.
Moreover, the company has already booked 100 reservations for a $98,000 suborbital space flight aboard a ‘‘space business jet’’ that hasn’t even been built.
Space Adventures President and Chief Executive Eric Anderson said Tito’s weeklong visit to the International Space Station and flight aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket has piqued interest in the fledgling space tourism industry.
When the movie ‘‘2001: A Space Odyssey’’ came out in 1968, ‘‘people envisioned that flights in space would be routine by now,’’ Anderson said. ‘‘When people really think about it, they realize this is long overdue.’’
NASA, which opposed Tito’s visit to the space station and demanded he sign waivers agreeing to pay for anything he breaks, says it has no plans to let civilians buy flights on its space shuttles.
It has, however, worked with its other international partners to develop procedures for future civilian visits to the space station, said NASA spokeswoman Debra Rahn. Those protocols, pushed forward because of Tito’s deal, should be in place by the end of June.
Tito ‘‘just flew a little earlier than the partners had anticipated,’’ Rahn said.
For now, the bulk of Space Adventures’ effort is directed toward what it hopes can be a more affordable space adventure: suborbital space flight, the type pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard took for the first time exactly 40 years ago, on May 5, 1961.
Space Adventures’ goal is to have the first tourists flying by 2005.
More than a dozen companies are working on a ‘‘space plane’’ that could make such a trip.
Anderson envisions a craft that would carry three to six tourists 100 kilometers up in the air, the accepted definition of a space flight. Passengers could experience three or four minutes of weightlessness and be able to look down on almost 3,000 miles of Earth’s surface - enough to take in the outline of North America’s East Coast.
Such a flight could require only four days of training, compared with the six months Tito underwent, Anderson said.
So far, 100 people and corporations have paid roughly $2 million in deposits, most it refundable, to get a spot on the first flights. The company plans to hold an auction among reservation holders to determine the order.
‘‘We’re engineers, so we never say 100 percent. But it would be highly unlikely that this won’t come about,’’ company Vice President Larry Ortega said.
Bob Haltermann, executive director of the Arlington-based Space Transportation Association’s tourism division, a nonprofit group that lobbies on behalf of space tourism, suggested that one of the seven seats on a space shuttle could be opened to the public through a lottery that could help NASA raise millions of needed dollars.
‘‘NASA is a very exclusive group of people, and they have a problem with wanting to keep it that way,’’ Haltermann said.
Tito, 60, said that when he returns to Earth, one of his first jobs will be trying to get NASA to embrace his idea that space is for everyone.
‘‘I am enjoying this so much,’’ Tito said Friday. ‘‘If I were allowed, I would spend several months up here in space.’’
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