Up, Up And Away!
Closer to the stars, housed in the orbit, travel has found a new destination: space. The concept of space travel is as old as the 1950′s. But back then, the wave of optimism about space stations and moon bases was soon overshadowed by the looming Cold War. Though space largely remained the domain of the national governments, private companies worked their way in with alacrity.
A case in example is British billionaire Richard Branson’s space tourism venture Virgin Galactic which cleared an important hurdle this April with the successful test flight of its rocket-powered SpaceShipTwo craft. Branson is just one among the many other evangelists of space travel. His company Virgin Galactic has been working since eight and a half years in an endeavour to be the first commercial space venture.
And this frenzy about space travel is only growing with ecstatic travelers paying up to $200,000 per ticket to get to space. Too pricey? Don’t fret space travel companies claim that since the market for space tourism is huge initial costs will fall considerably as the years progress.
Whats in store for packing your bags and shelling out a fortune? The expansive view of the planets including our own. It is said that all the features of our ‘blue planet’ as Yuri Gagarin (the first man in space) described it are visible to the eye. Feast your eyes on the varied landscape of the earth – its deserts, mountains, jungles, the night view of cities. What’s more? Even the stars are more clearly visible from up there!
Besides space gazing, floating in zero gravity, experiencing weightlessness, playing with water are all experiences you would not want to miss. Water as you must have guessed, does not fall to the ground in space, instead forms little spheres which you can line up and move around in mid-air in front of you just by blowing them. Want some more fun? blow air into one with a straw and make it swell up like a balloon. Or set one spinning so it forms a ‘rope’ of water. If these don’t satiate you, space sports that will be introduced with time should!
As of now, to match up to the hullabaloo surrounding space travel, the industry needs to manufacture safe, low-cost, passenger-carrying launch vehicles. This is because low-cost vehicles will reduce the cost of travel and thereby cater to many more than just the super rich. If luck favours the space lovers, flights to the orbit may kick off by the end of the year or the beginning of 2014.
Spaced out already? Save up some money and reserve yourself a ticket for an experience that is literally ‘out of the world’!
