Tourists in Space

Many years ago, the late Science Fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote that he intended to go to the Moon just a soon as the passenger service started up. A scientist and engineer himself (he invented the communications satellite in 1946, more than a decade before the first artificial satellite was launched), Clarke probably knew that he likely wouldn’t live to see such an event, but given that only 32 years passed between the Wright Brothers first flight and that of the DC-3, we can certainly understand why he thought a similar interval might pass between the first manned space flight and regular commercial service – and Clarke was alive and well in April and May of 1993, thirty-two years after Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard, respectively, became the first men in space…

For all of the fanciful drawing of space shuttles painted to look like airliners and movies with spaceships in Pan Am colors, the commercial exploitation of space travel has so far been limited to communications satellites and similar machines; nearly fifty years after the first manned space flights the only private citizens in space have been a handful of people who have convinced one space agency or another to sell them a seat and a single “Virgin Galactic” suborbital space plane. If the commercial use of space is ever going to include passengers, there will need to be cheaper and more reliable ways of reaching (and leaving) orbit, and places to go/things to do once you get there. There’s a company in Nevada that may be about to change all of that, however…

You can find the New York Times story here, if you want to; there was also a profile on this company in the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine a few issues back. The idea of an inflatable space station may sound a little outlandish, but the technology was actually developed over 50 years ago, and a number of test projects have worked quite well in practice. It probably sounds a bit less crazy when you consider that the inflatable structures in question have metallic and foam skins, and remember that in zero-gravity there is no stress on the structure. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that these relatively simple and inexpensive structures have the potential to house six times the number of residents currently supported by the International Space Station – and that’s just the pilot project…

Of course, we still have the issue of inexpensive lift to orbit – which so far remains science fiction. And even if we can get that detail covered, tourism isn’t going to be enough to sustain a commercial presence in space (there are only so many hyper-rich adventure tourists to go around). But if the scientific and manufacturing possibilities of orbital workshops have even a tenth of the potential that people have been writing about for the past fifty years, it’s just possible that people might start putting laboratories and factories in the sky, assuming it was economically feasible to do so – and that would necessitate passenger service at least as far as the orbital Economic Development zone…

When I was a child, the idea that average people would one day venture into space on vacation was science fiction; even though there were manned space flights, “sensible” people knew it would be another thousand years before such things happened, if they were possible at all. But then, when my grandfather was a child, they said the same things about the flying machines launched at Kittyhawk the year before he was born, and those seem to have worked out okay. I’m not sure if we’ll live to see Virgin Galactic flights scheduled to an orbital complex of commercial hotels and resorts – or if I’ll be able to afford a ticket if they do. But if these news stories are correct, I’d suggest that everyone be really careful before you decide what’s possible and what’s not…