Elite Traveler March-April 2015

INSPIRE FRONTIERS

"The expectation was we’d have sent people toMars by the time we’d grown up, and there would be a hotel in space" disintegrated upon re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. A wholesale re-examination of America’s space program began, with NASA’s centrality to all areas of space flight being officially questioned for the first time. Fresh thinking was needed, and tapping into the pool of entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who had previously been excluded suddenly made sense. Out of heartbreak came an historic opportunity. Barely a decade on, the space frontier is well and truly open for business and a major part of that business will be space tourism. Blue Origin, a firm founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is busy developing a spaceship which takes off and lands vertically, while the video game designer John Carmack (of Doom and Quake fame) tested his own system with Armadillo Aerospace in Texas and XCOR forges ahead with its two-seater Lynx spaceplane in California’s Mojave desert. All hope to offer flights for less than $100,000 a trip, while Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic claims to have taken almost 600 down-payments on flights aboard its sexy-looking SpaceShipTwo, at $250,000 per flight. The crash of its first SpaceShipTwo craft during a test flight last October served as a reminder that going into space will never be risk-free, but has so far done little to dampen enthusiasm. Among the frontrunners of the space-obsessed tech innovators is the extraordinary Elon Musk, founder not only of the electric car manufacturer, Tesla, but also of SpaceX, which is busy re-drawing the space flight rulebook. Where NASA’s now-retired Space Shuttle cost roughly $450m to ferry crew to the International Space Station, Musk’s Falcon launch system will soon do the same job for $60m – a near 87% saving. And if the reusable rocket he is currently developing works, SpaceX will be able to reach Earth’s orbit for the cost of fuel alone, or approximately $200,000: a figure which would revolutionize public access to space. Visiting Musk at his cavernous SpaceX HQ near Los Angeles’

2003

Space Shuttle Columbia breaks up on re-entry

LAX airport is like walking on to a movie set of the Silicon Valley start-up. While young staff in camouflage shorts and Metallica T-shirts move around the plant aboard adult-sized trikes, or discuss engineering issues at the free frozen yogurt bar, Musk sits at his open-plan corner workstation in a check shirt, jeans and sneakers. Gazing around the place as he attempts to triage his email, it’s not hard to see how he came to be the inspiration for Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies. Musk was born in 1971, just as the Apollo lunar program was winding down, and I’ve often wondered whether he and his peers covet space from a sense of having missed the party? “Actually, I think my generation does feel a bit cheated by that,” he frowns. “Or rather, disappointed that things didn’t progress from there. Because the expectation was always that there’d be a base on the moon and that we’d have sent people to Mars by the time we’d grown up, and that there would be a hotel in space. In 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C Clarke based his whole story on that. And yet here we are in 2013 and the US cannot even send a person into low earth orbit. Nobody would have believed such an outcome back in 1969.” What made him think he could change this? “It was probably just thinking that something needs to be done to advance the technology,” he says. “I wasn’t sure how far we’d get, but if we could just move the ball forward, that would be a good outcome. And now I think we ought to be able to improve it an awful lot. And maybe get all the way there.” With the right cash to flash, you can already get most of the way. My “edge of space” adventure was provided by the space tourism pioneers Space Adventures, who have also arranged for half a dozen civilians to travel to the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz rockets at a reported cost of $20m per seat. More intriguingly, the company claims to have sold at least one ticket on a circumlunar

2015

Deep Ocean Expeditions dives up to 3000feet