Rocket Race
And there is risk. Remember, two of the five shuttles have been lost. On a per mission basis, 1.8 percent ended in disaster. And even the rigors of ultimately victorious flights may prove disheartening for potential fliers. Midway through the first part of SpaceShipOne's initial X Prize flight, the craft began to corkscrew as it rose through the air. Anyone up for barrel rolls at Mach 3?
Just another ride. At some point, perhaps within two decades, flying into space may become more like taking the Concorde to Europe: pretty pricey, pretty cool, and relatively safe. Jay Penn, head of the Reusable Launch Office at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, Calif., estimates that at $15,000 a ticket, space tourism will become more of a mass-market experience and less an extreme adventure like climbing Everest. But there are downsides. "You might be able to attract new customers, but you will also alienate those who don't want grandma on the flight because they are pretending to be spacemen," says Zolli. But giving grandma and grandpa the opportunity to show they have the right stuff is exactly the point.
And those folks just might want to stay the night. Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites of America, hopes to create space station hotels, floating, inflatable modules that could also be used as orbiting laboratories. And to help get the customers to the lobbies, Bigelow is offering a $50 million prize to the first private team to build a craft that can ferry people to his space stations, which he plans to launch on commercial rockets by the end of the decade. This is no easy task, as an orbital space plane would have to climb four times as high and zoom six times as fast as SpaceShipOne.
Some might say that such plans are a real reach given the current state of the technology and marketplace. But Branson is cooking up an even more far-out plan. "Before he dies, Richard wants to take a private space mission to Mars," says Virgin's Whitehorn. Wonder if they'll need Megastores on the Red Planet.
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