Get ready to join in the new space race

Stag parties on Saturn, vacations on Venus — once Neil Armstrong took that one small step back in 1969 the world awaited giant leaps in space tourism. And it’s finally coming.

FUTUROLOGISTS predicted space hotels would take in their first guests during the 1980s, a permanent moon base would be completed in the early ’90s and another US flag would be planted in the Martian dust by the turn of the millennium.

Instead, Earth’s orbit has had a giant flashing ‘Vacant’ sign on it, still awaiting the promised hordes of holidaymakers. The last man on the moon left 40 years ago and the only activity on the lunar landscape since has been performed by a handful of robotic probes.

Meanwhile, the Red Planet remains at least a decade away in terms of anyone — be they American, Russian or Chinese — trumping Armstrong by becoming the first human to step onto another planet. So, why have we waited so long for the Space Age to yield space tourism? Why has the final frontier remained off-limits to the public at large, only accessible to professional astronauts and a handful of millionaires? The answer is complex, but can be boiled down to two things: fear and cash.

Neil Armstrong, who passed away last month aged 82, was a massive fan of Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic. Like his hero, Armstrong became a frontiersman, showing the way for others to follow. But, unlike Lindbergh’s achievement, the public did not and could not follow Armstrong. Lindbergh flew across the ocean in 1927. Forty years later, air passengers took the same route while enjoying in-flight movies and four-course meals. Armstrong flew to the moon in 1969. Forty years later, his bootprints remain undisturbed by any lunar tourist taking photos of what Buzz Aldrin called the moon’s “magnificent desolation”.

America’s initiative to put a man on the moon was driven by being upstaged in the Space Race not once but twice by the Soviets. By putting the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, and then the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit, the American public feared for their safety. Furthermore, an entire nation’s ego had been severely bruised by its archenemy. In the high stakes poker game between the US and the USSR only a man on the moon could trump the twin aces of a satellite and a cosmonaut.

John F Kennedy made his famous speech in 1961, pledging the US to the goal “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. But you can’t get to the moon fuelled by fear and initiative alone. You need cold hard cash. And lots of it. It is estimated that the Apollo programme cost in the region of $20bn — about $110bn in today’s money.

As part of the show of technological, ideological and political might, live TV images of Armstrong’s epic descent from the lunar module and step onto the lunar surface was beamed around the world and watched by at least half a billion souls. At that precise moment Armstrong stopped being a symbol of America and democracy and became simply an ambassador for the human race. It was everyone’s success.

It was also an epic anti-climax. Once the moon race had been won, the two superpowers settled down into the deep freeze of the Cold War. Public interest in space travel also cooled, such that by the time Eugene Cernan became the last man on the moon in 1972 the images were just part of the nightly news reports. Voyages to the moon had gone from epic to banal within three years. The virtual queues of excited citizens seeking return tickets for trips to the moon dissipated in the surge of general apathy and specific anger in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam.

It was almost a decade later that public interest was piqued again with the launch of the space shuttle Columbia’s maiden flight in 1981. Again, a public and political backlash was triggered by two shuttle catastrophes — Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, which killed 14 astronauts. Despite the loss of lives Nasa’s safety record remained impressive, carrying out 135 missions into space before the programme was grounded due to budget cuts in 2011.

The first space tourist was Dennis Tito, an American investment manager who paid $20m to spend eight days aboard the international space station in 2001. He was followed by six other multi-millionaires between 2002 and 2009, who each paid $20m-$35m for the experience.

Nasa’s recent decision to court private investment for future missions was seen as a retrograde step by space fans, but it could speed up the chances of Joe Public leaving terra firma. While the Russian’s Soyuz rockets are the only flights available today for astronauts to get to the international space station, commercial enterprises are busily preparing themselves at the starting line for Space Race

II. Finally, members of the public are being offered the chance to take a ride to the mesosphere, 100km up, high enough to be in space, but not high enough to escape the grasp of gravity.

Leading the way is British tycoon Richard Branson’s fleet of Virgin Galactic spaceplanes. All going well, the first six passengers will ascend 15km with the help of a special craft called White Knight Two, then the spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo, will disengage and fire its rockets for 90 seconds attaining a speed of up to 4,000km/h. Once it reaches space the lucky passengers will enjoy the experience of up to seven minutes of zero gravity, while enjoying the view of Earth’s curvature and the thin blue envelope of air below the inky void of space.

At $200,000 each the tickets don’t come cheap. But then again, they’re 100 times cheaper than the journey fare to the international space station. Branson and his children are expected to be aboard the first flight. Some 550 seats have been sold and if you can afford the price you have a chance of taking the journey with the likes of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Katy Perry.

The commercialisation of space won’t stop at the international space station, 400km above our heads. Space Adventures, the company that facilitated Tito and co’s trips to the space station, announced last year that it had sold one of two seats available for a round-the-moon voyage in 2015 priced at $100m per person.

Meanwhile, Dutch entrepreneur, Bas Lansdorp, is planning to send the first humans to Mars in 2023 at a cost of $6bn. The catch? It’s a one-way trip. The pioneers would be selected as part of a reality TV show and would be joined by 16 other colonists within a decade.

So, Space Race II will begin in earnest next year, approaching half a century after Neil Armstrong took a short walk on an alien world. Space tourism will never become as routine as taking a flight to the other side of the planet, but it should become safer and cheaper. Until then, it’s a small step towards allowing the dreamers among us the chance of joining the 70-mile-high club.