LAS CRUCES, N.M. – Off-planet travel is an experience like no other, say
those that have already travelled into orbit. And that's just what ticketed,
still-to-fly customers for future suborbital treks want to hear.
Space travelers – those that have
flown, as well as patrons-in-waiting for commercial spaceline operations to
begin – spoke at the 2007 International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight (ISPS),
held here October 24-25.
Reda Anderson, the first customer to
sign up for a suborbital sendoff courtesy of Rocketplane Global, Inc., listed
the "three R's" of commercial personal spaceflight: Risk, Reward, and
Responsibility.
Anderson doesn't see herself as a tourist.
"That's because they are not
serving coffee on this flight. I see myself as a pioneer ... one of, say, the
first 100 people that certainly are pioneers, maybe the first 500," she
said.
"We are the ones who'll begin
this movement," Anderson added. "Darn right I know I could die there."
Opening up the market
For Craig Willan, a future passenger
on Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic suborbital
spaceliner: "I'm not worthy to be called an astronaut or an astronaut
candidate. I'm a space traveler ... that's basically it." His official job
here on Earth is President of Omega Research and Engineering, Inc. of Justin, Texas.
Like Anderson, Willan also said that
he readily accepts the risks associated with public space travel.
As for the current price tag to fly
aboard the suborbital SpaceShipTwo, now being built for Virgin Galactic, Willan's
seat into space is costing $200,000. He'll be one of the first 100 to ride that
vessel and believes that, potentially, ticket prices are going to come down – way,
way down in the future.
Earlier in the day, Alex Tai, Chief
Operation Officer for Virgin Galactic, noted that the company now has $31
million in deposits from future suborbital space travelers. "When we start
flying people from Spaceport America here, and we show people exactly how
wonderful it is to go to space and the wonderful experience you can have ... the
market is really going to open up," he said.
Like a dream
There are two things you'll remember
about being in space, explained Michael Lopez-Alegria, a veteran NASA spaceflyer
with 10 spacewalks to his credit, as well as a stint aboard the International
Space Station.
"The first is that it's better
than you ever imagined. And the second is that you can't go back in your mind ...
it's like a dream, like a parallel existence that you just can't get your arms
around," Lopez-Alegria said. He said that once you've lived in space, the
experience you'd like to bottle up so you can take a sniff of it every once in
a while.
"Space is very addicting ... so
be ready for that," Lopez-Alegria suggested to the audience. Launch and
the speed needed to reach Earth orbit are truly amazing events, he said.
The sensation of floating – whether
you equate that to a fish or a bird – "it doesn't matter. The sensation is
unbelievable ... and the amazing thing is that it just never stops,"
Lopez-Alegria said.
In viewing the Earth from space,
Lopez-Alegria said that our planet takes on many faces. "It looks fragile.
It looks sturdy. It looks inviting. It looks hostile," he suggested.
From a spacewalker's perspective,
with the freedom of looking at the sky during a night part of an orbit around
the Earth, Lopez-Alegria pointed out: "Instead of seeing a black sky with
pinpoints of light, it's almost as if you see a white sky with pinpoints of
black. That's how many stars there are," he said.
Exceeds all expectations
A little over a year ago, Anousheh
Ansari, attracted worldwide notice as the first female private space
explorer to board the International Space Station. The high-tech businesswoman
and co-founder of Prodea Systems of Plano, Texas paid some $20 million for her
orbital adventure in September 2006.
The actual experience "exceeds
all expectations" and is something that's hard to put to words, Ansari
advised. "A lot of people say that diving is the closest thing to being
weightless. It comes close, but still, it's not the same."
Ansari's suggestion, for those
taking suborbital flights of short duration, is that future travelers need to
make the whole journey the experience – and not just focus on the moment of
weightlessness or the moment you see Earth. The entire preparation and mental
preparedness is part of the journey, she said.
"There are a lot of new
sensations that you'll be introduced to, and you need to mentally be prepared
for that," Ansari said.
In her mission into Earth orbit,
being able to observe the Earth from space had an impact on her. "It sort
of reduces things to a size that you think everything is manageable. All these
things that may seem big and impossible ... we can do this. Peace on Earth – no
problem. It gives people that type of energy ... that type of power, and I have
experienced that."
Stellar-traveling species
Retired NASA astronaut, Dan Barry,
has a trio of spaceflights under his flight helmet. His take home message
regarding the importance of taking risk in order to fly through space boiled
down to one word: adaptation.
"Life is something that
modifies its environment ... changes things around in order to succeed,"
Barry explained. The obvious adaptation of the human race to all of the issues
that are confronting us on the planet is to leave – to develop a spacefaring
society, he said.
Mars is Barry's object of choice in
regards to human expansion outward, on the drive to eventually become a
stellar-traveling species.
"It is more than just nice. It's
an obligation for us to get off this planet – to make it no longer possible to
wipe out the species with a single event, an asteroid, or a crazy virus or an
ecological runaway," Barry said. "It becomes not a destiny, but an absolute
necessity for us to establish a place on Mars that is permanent, independent ... and
capable of sustaining the species without Earth."
advertisement
advertisement
