S PACE TOURIS M
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Tito remembers spending half
Most astronauts talk about their experience for the rest of their lives
of every Earth orbit staring out of the spaceship porthole at the incredible views, while listening to opera. “I never got bored looking out. It was such an awesome experience being off the planet and being one of the privileged few humans to do this. It’s never left me. I think of it every day.” What else can wide-eyed space
tourists expect to behold? On any future spaceflights, the views of Earth will no doubt rapidly fill up the memories of their mobile phones. Zero gravity is another out- of-this-world experience they will surely dine out on, though it’s not easy to acclimatise to. George Pantalos works in bioengineering
at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. He was lucky enough to experience weightlessness on NASA’s KC-135 zero- gravity plane used to train astronauts, otherwise known as the “vomit comet”. “In weightlessness, you are effortlessly
floating,” he explains. “Te most comparable feeling is floating in water without the sensation of water on your skin. Because you feel so light, you can move about with the slightest amount of effort. Pushing
AP RIL 2 0 18
off a surface too hard, which is the common mistake of all first-time free- floaters, results in you zinging around like a
ping-pong ball. Nice and easy does the trick. Peter
Pan never had it so good, and Michael Jordan only got a few
seconds of hang time. In weightlessness, you have all the hang time you need.” Given the rapid advances in reusable
rocket technology, it might be assumed that space travel will eventually become as common as visiting the poles or climbing Mount Everest. Virgin Galactic plans to build a whole fleet of spacecraft for tourists. “There have been 560 or so people who have been into space to date,” Attenborough says. “I would expect that we would fly that number of people in just a few years.” He refused, however, to be more precise than this on passenger numbers. Space tourism, Attenborough believes,
is far more important than simply being an opportunity for multimillionaires to boast about their holidays.
ABOVE: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 at Vandenberg, California “We’re going to offer people an
extraordinary, profound and life-changing experience. If you read the accounts of professional astronauts who have gone to space in the last 50 years, most of them came back and talked about their experience for the rest of their lives. They come back with a clear perspective: there is only one [habitable] planet we know of. There isn’t an alternative home for us within reach at the moment. Earth is extremely beautiful; it looks very fragile from space. There is a sense we’re all in this together, and that there’s much more that unites us than divides us. By being able to give a lot more people a similar experience, we think spaceflight has a powerful, potential force for good in its own right.” Until then, ticket prices remain at
US$250,000 a flight. Naturally, Richard Branson, the boss of Virgin Galactic, has a seat reserved on the inaugural commercial flight. And Attenborough, as the first employee hired by Virgin Galactic 13 years ago, won’t be far behind.
bus ine s s tr a v el ler .c om
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