SA trio fight for free ride into space
Competition finalists face gruelling tests in US
MARK Shuttleworth paid $20-million (R200-million) to become the first African in space.
Now, 11 years later, three South Africans are vying for a free seat on the Dutch Space Expedition Corporation’s new craft — to become this country’s first tourist aboard a privately owned spaceship.
But long before one of them will set foot on the Lynx Mark 2, which is still being built, the three had to battle 25 others at a boot camp in Parys in the Free State.
The group had reached the semifinals of the South African leg of an international competition run by product manufacturer Unilever, which will splash out R1-million on a ticket for the lucky South African’s jaunt.
Unilever plans to fly 22 winners from some of the 75 participating countries to space— for just one super-fast hour — next year.
The Mark 2 will be going 103km into space, which is what the winner will be doing
On Friday, the local semi-finalists arrived in Parys for a gruelling day of tests that included dropping sandbags while skydiving from 1 000 feet and having to attach flags to a pole in a spinning “vomit comet”.
By lunch, just six of the 28 hopefuls were left and none of the three participating women had made it.
Laura Beamish, a graphic design student from Benoni, said: “I didn’t cry, but I was so bleak. Inside, my heart was crying. Going to space was always my dream.”
She entered the competition in March in a radio station challenge.
“I had to go to a gym, find a guy and spray him with Axe [deodorant, the competition sponsor] and tell him he stank. The worst part is that I did this all in my pyjamas,” said Beamish, 22.
Leroy Smith, a porter at St Augustine’s Hospital in Durban, did not mind being ditched.
“I was really looking forward to going to space, but I knew it was going to be a tough competition. I didn’t do maths or science at school, so I entered for fun. It wasn’t that serious to me,” said Smith.
By the end of the day, the final three, Mandla Maseko, Haroon Osman and Dean Roddan, were that much closer to their dream of going to space.
Maseko, a 24-year-old DJ from Mabopane in Pretoria, said it was the best gift for his upcoming birthday.
He hopes the experience will bring him a step closer to finishing his civil engineering studies, which stalled because of financial constraints.
“I’ve always wanted to finish my studies. I was just one course away from finishing school, but I ran out of funds,” said Maseko.
Osman, a 38-year-old businessman from Lenasia, Johannesburg, said he hoped to be “the first Muslim in space”.
Father-of-two Roddan, 41, from Waverley, Johannesburg, said: “This is the stuff that dreams are made of.” He is a flight-simulation manager.
The three are scheduled to travel to Florida in the US for a final three-day challenge at which one of them will bag the winning seat.
If all goes according to plan, the winning South African will join the likes of Justin Bieber and other celebrities reported to have splurged on seats.
The Lynx Mark 2 will take tourists to an altitude of around 338 000 feet, almost 10 times higher than a Boeing 747’s average altitude of 33 000 feet.
“We are taking the first flight to space later this year, and we will have between 50 and 200 tests before we can start taking paying clients up,” said Harry van Hulten, an astronautics expert and co-founder of the space tourism company.
“We already have 250 tickets sold so far to go up to space with the Lynx Mark 1, going 60km into space, at a cost of $95 000 [R950 000],” he said.
“The Mark 2 will be going 103km into space, which is what the winner of this competition will be doing.”
But first Maseko, Osman and Roddan will jet off to the US for their final challenge.
They will have to survive extreme gravitational-force tests and endure gravitational pressure on an aircraft similar to that of a US Air Force combat aircraft as passengers.
The three will also need to withstand the insane pressure of a Gcentrifuge machine, which, owing to a high level of acceleration, can cause loss of consciousness.
The experiences are part of training for astronauts and can test a person’s tolerance for speed levels outside Earth’s atmosphere.
Vincent Viviers of Axe SA said that for the initial round, contestants had to meet only very basic requirements — a maximum weight limit of around 113kg, height of no more than 1.98m, no major heart or lung diseases and not suffer from claustrophobia. — mbeleg@sundaytimes.co.za