STEP 3: RESEARCH FLIGHTS
Frequent fliers are a dedicated lot, obsessed with accumulating status points and the inside scoop on the insand-outs of airline mileage partners, tips for upgrades and where the best business class lounges are located. To reach the stars, however, it really comes down to which billionaire you admire (or trust your life with) most.
Currently, Space Adventures is the only company to have successfully flown tourists to space, including its founder, gaming tycoon Richard Garriott, who spent 12 days in space in 2008 for a slick US$30 million. (His father is the late NASA astronaut Owen Garriott.) But without its own fleet of rockets, Space Adventures is more of a travel agency, having facilitated trips to the ISS via Russia’s Space Programme, Roscosmos, as, up until 2019, NASA banned commercial flights to the space station. Space Adventures recently announced that it has entered an agreement with SpaceX to send travellers into orbit far beyond the ISS, on trips that will last up to five days, as soon as next year.
Musk, the South African billionaire, founded SpaceX in 2002 with grandiose plans of facilitating human settlement on Mars. But for now, he’s focused on space tourism, having announced two years ago that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, founder of fashion retail site Zozotown, will be the first private customer to board a SpaceX rocket on a journey around the moon. He hopes to take the trip as soon as 2023 and will follow the same path as Apollo 13’s 1970 voyage.
The 44-year-old Maezawa has money to burn. In 2017, the art collector dropped a cool US$110.5 million on a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Now he’s dropping even more to bring up to 10 artists, including a painter, a musician, a film director and a fashion designer, to join him. Through this project, which he has dubbed #dearMoon, Maezawa hopes that his planetary posse will “be inspired in a way they have never been before”.
On the project’s website, Maezawa muses, “If Pablo Picasso had been able to see the moon up-close, what kind of paintings would he have drawn? If John Lennon could have seen the curvature of the Earth, what kind of songs would he have written? If they had gone to space, how would the world have looked today?” Hey, big spender, ever wonder what a journalist would write if she were invited along?
Meanwhile, Sir Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 with the aim to be the world’s first commercial spaceline. Characteristically ambitious, Branson suggested that a maiden flight could have happened as early as 2009, but it hasn’t happened yet. In 2014, VSS Enterprise, an experimental spaceflight test vehicle operated by Virgin Galactic, suffered a horrific crash, ultimately delaying its SpaceShipTwo voyage that was originally slated for 2015.
But things got back on track after SpaceShipTwo flew to the edge of space with two test pilots in December 2018 and made a successful test flight in February 2019, when two pilots and one passenger enjoyed four minutes of microgravity before gliding back to Earth. Virgin Galactic passengers can expect a similar experience once commercial flights become available. To date, over 600 tickets have been sold.
Not to be outdone, Jeff Bezos, despite making his billions through Amazon and having financed the renaissance of The Washington Post, has said that his space venture, Blue Origin, is his “most important work”. His sights have always been set on the stars (he led Princeton’s chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) and now, Bezos is slowly but surely getting there.
While Virgin Galactic has promoted itself aggressively in the media, Blue Origin, actually the oldest venture having been founded in 2000, has been more discreet. The cost for flying to space with Blue Origin remains unknown, and tickets are not yet for sale. In December 2019, Blue Origin launched its 12th unmanned test flight to the edge of space and back. Rumour has it that this could be one of the last trial runs before passengers are welcomed aboard. The New Shepard spacecraft is designed to seat six passengers at a time, with what are described as the largest windows in the business for optimal universe-viewing pleasure.
Meanwhile, The Gateway Foundation has plans to open a gigantic, wheel-shaped, rotating space hotel— very Stanley Kubrick—by 2025. Named the Von Braun Station, the facility hopes to someday welcome 100 tourists per week and, complete with artificial gravity, aims to offer the comfort and facilities of a luxury cruise ship, including restaurants, bars, movie screenings and sports. Zero-gravity quidditch matches—the fictional sport played by Harry Potter and fellow wizards—are said to be in the cards.