Is Space Travel Just a Commercial Stunt?

Space tourism is becoming increasingly popular and some people hope it will become the next big attraction and maybe the ideal family vacation, sometime in the near future. Current private trips to space may cost around $20 million, so it's not an affordable ride for mere mortals, but more and more companies announce their intention to offer space tours "really soon."

But are they for real, or is it just a commercial stunt designed to attract investors and the general public alike? Among the most important players in the field, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic stated that will launch the first space tours for private tourists late 2009 at the earliest, a company called Space Adventures, headquartered in Vienna, Virginia sells tickets for the "first" private expedition to the Moon, and even the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company EADS, the largest European aerospace corporation, presented a revolutionary new vehicle for space tourism the size of a business jet.

One thing not many of these companies are saying is that they haven't solved some of the most important problems of space travel, or worse, that they don't have the money to build spaceships for this purpose, so that's why they're selling tickets in advance, lots of them.

"In the last quarter, we have doubled the number of bookings taken on the same time last year," said Carolyn Wincer, head of Astronaut Sales for Virgin Galactic, contrary to what they had expected. "

"I hope to have those contracts signed by the end of the year," said Eric Anderson, Space Adventures' president and CEO.

Are people really buying real tickets or just investing in tour operators that literally promise the Moon? With $1.5 billion already invested in new air transportation ventures and an estimated $1 billion in new commercial space ventures, space tours seem closer than ever.

In reality, many of the challenges of sending a private person into space are not debated by the major players in the industry, like training them for actually taking off and dealing with microgravity.

I mean, come on, if it were that simple, then astronauts would come out of training schools like cars out of an automated assembly line. There are also safety issues here. Since NASA lost two shuttles this century alone, with all the money and the technology they have, who can say for sure that no private expedition will end in a disaster? What would they do then, make the customers sign a release form that will sound like "I hereby agree to put my life at risk, in what could be a lethal trip, in exchange for paying a few million dollars"?

A quote from Esther Dyson, an imaginer specializing in the computer industry and entrepreneurial investment, hosting a public space travel experts conference called "Flight School 2007 — Flying: Beyond A to B," open this week:

"In other words, if it [space travel] were defined as useful, it would have to be much safer. But the only way it can get safer is through trial and error. In fact, we need a little more trial and error in aviation, not on the safety side, but on the business model side."

No thank you, I'm not a Guinea pig!

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