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March 2019

Travel

The First Space Tourists?

Space Tourists

On July 20 1969 at 20.17 UTC, Neil Armstrong landed Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon. The summer of 2019 could be the year of the first space tourists. Both Virgin and Blue Origin (Amazon/Jeff Bezos) are thought to be close to being able to offer a journey into space to view the curvature of the earth and to experience weightlessness.
A third contender, Elon Musk is still a few years away, but the proposal there is to send a passenger to orbit around the moon.
Virgin have already had a second successful test launch, reaching 56 miles up, and it is thought that they will run up to another 4 tests before it is made available to the public.
A new facility is currently being built to accommodate space tourists before they depart. It will be a lot more high tech than most airports, but presumably will not need to feature passport control or duty free shops.



The cost is estimated to be about $250,000 per person. Sadly, I do not expect to be arranging too many of these in the immediate future….. what a referral that would be! But it did get me thinking about the sort of (non-literal) “out of this world” experience I would like to do. Round the world cruise? Safari? Realistically, and perhaps only slightly out of reach at the moment, an Antarctic cruise might be top of my wish list. I probably could not decide whether to go for the more basic, expedition style cruise, or whether to go for a more luxurious trip. I would possible veer to the expedition style, to include meeting the lighthouse keeper at Cape Horn, the most Southernly point.