Tourism

Sir Richard Branson is a dreamer. He wanted to build the UK’s biggest music store and came up with Virgin Records, which has signed artists of the caliber of Phil Collins and the Rolling Stones. He wanted to conquer the airways and his company Virgin Atlantic Airways achieved that in 1994. He wanted to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, and did it in world record time. He most recent dream is to conquer outer space by providing trips to space tourists, and this dream too is about to become reality.

The multimillionaire bought the rights to the technology developed by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, who in 2004 built SpaceShipOne, the first private spaceship piloted by a human to reach an altitude of more than one hundred kilometers above the earth. To provide some idea of what we are talking about, in the USA, any flight that reaches an altitude of more than 80 kilometers is considered as space flight. And the International Aeronautical Federation considers that space flight begins at one hundred kilometers. So Rutan’s invention met both sets of criteria and thus opened the doors for normal people, not only astronauts, to travel to outer space.

As soon as Sir Richard Branson learned of Burt Rutan’s achievement, he saw the possibility of making his dream a reality, and he did not hesitate in acquiring the rights to the invention and setting up a company with the engineer, for the purposes of carrying a significant number of wealthy travelers into low earth orbit.

These two innovators have been working on the project since 2005 and are now ready to offer space tourism, starting in 2009. Tickets have also been on sale since 2005, at a price tag of 200,000 each. His dream has captured the imagination of lovers of extreme adventure. 200 tickets have already been sold for the first flights, each of which will carry a crew of two and eight passengers, and 85,000 more people, from 125 countries, have joined the waiting list for future flights. To begin with there will be one flight per week, but the intention is to increase this to one or two per day.

What will it be like for these space travelers? Their adventure begins the moment they buy their ticket from one of the authorized agencies of the Virtuoso chain that specializes in amazing luxury travel, and is the only outlet approved by Virgin Galactic for the sale of tickets. Once they have their ticket, the travelers will begin to receive information about the progress on the construction of SpaceShipTwo, based on the original design of SpaceShipOne. They will also be able to follow the progress of the development of WhiteKnightTwo, the booster ship that will propel passengers and crew on the first fifteen kilometers of their journey.

Three days before their voyage, the passengers will arrive at the lift off site: the complex in Mojave, California known as Scaled Composites. This is where the space ships are built and where the space travelers will receive the training necessary to live out their space adventure to the full. During these three days, they will learn about micro gravity, macro gravity, G forces and other terms that up to now have been the preserve of astronauts. They will also take simulated flights in a centrifuge, be a passenger on a parabolic flight as well as undergoing medical examinations.

They will carry this knowledge with them as the moment of lift off arrives. The huge booster rocket WhiteKnightTwo is responsible for the first part of the journey, which begins with the countdown, the roar of the rocket engine and an incredible feeling of being nailed down in your seat by the acceleration of the space ship. In just 10 seconds the spaceship will reach the speed of sound and after 30 seconds, it will be travelling at 4,000 kilometers per hour.

At this point of the journey adrenaline will be mixing with excitement as the passengers observe the blue of the sky changing color through the spaceship’s 15 windows, firstly to a bluish purple and then to a vast expanse of black, indicating that the ship has passed out of the earth’s atmosphere.

And then silence rules. Having reached an altitude of 15 kilometers, SpaceShipTwo separates from the booster on its way to a final altitude of 109 kilometers. Released from the effects of gravity, the travelers can leave their seats and float along the length of the spaceship, experiencing a sense of freedom that none of them will have known up to that point. A view out of the windows at this point in the journey provides an all round view up to 1,600 kilometers, and passengers will be able to see planet earth’s amazing blue landscape, which up to then they have only been able to see in photographs or cinema and television screens. For the first time, these few fortunate ones will have the chance to have a really good look at this corner of the universe that they call home. And then the voyage back home begins, and the whole experience from start to finish will have taken two and a half hours.

The first such space travelers will be called the Founders, and they will blast off from the base in California. The second group (some one thousand travelers) will be known as Pioneers. These will be followed by the Travelers who will have to wait for Virgin Galactic’s second year of operations. These last two groups will blast off from the space port that the company is building in New Mexico, at a cost of US$200 million. To date, thirteen agencies in Latin America, including Aviatur in Colombia, have been authorized to sell tickets to anyone wanting to enjoy the experience and who have the means to pay for it. They will all be sharing in the dream that Sir Richard Branson had four years ago, and once he has taken ordinary people like you and me into space, his next adventure will be to provide voyages to the Aurora Borealis.