Your Next Holiday Destination: Space!

Forget the Maldives or the Bahamas, your next holiday will be thousands of feet up!

We are currently in that age where the technology that we currently have allows us to travel in different parts of our planet. This technology also allowed us to travel to the far reaches of space – even putting humans on the surface of the Moon.
With that, space travel became somewhat more commercialized in the past couple of years. Companies like Virgin Galactic have offered seats of up to $200,000 to which it generated positive response from interested parties. These space tourists included notable personalities to celebrities, with some even paying millions of dollars for a seat.

Space tourism isn’t as easy as riding a rocket and then blasting off to space. An intensive training process must be done to ensure that the individual will meet the harsh environments of space and this training can usually take up to months before the launch. Additionally, you can factor in the delays that are bound to happen before the launch – which is a normal occurrence for space travel.

Most of these trips usually take you to the International Space Station, there are also offerings that would take you on orbital and suborbital flights. Other countries such as Russia, Japan, India and even the UAE have stated plans on bringing their own technologies for the advancement of space travel.

Other private companies have also started prosing orbital ventures for space tourists, with some even developing their own spacecraft for the journey. An example is SpaceX, a private company that has developed their own rocket called Falcon that will enable it to fly a capsule called Dragon that can bring up to seven people to any space station. One quite ambitious feat is the proposal of the Space Island Group, which as you have read from the name, plans to bring more than 20,000 people on a ‘space island’ by 2020.

Additionally, the UAE has recently announced plans its mission to study the planet Mars. And while the mission is unmanned, I believe it won’t be too long before it will start bringing tourists to the red planet. It might even feature some of the ‘tallest’ or ‘biggest’ things we have seen in space.

So how much exactly do you need to travel to space? You’ve already seen Virgin Galactic charging more than $250,000 for a seat and this includes a 3 day preparation along with the required G-Force training and other Virgin Group exclusive perks.
XCOR Aerospace and World View Enterprises charge $95,000 and $75,000 respectively for a seat. XCOR Aerospace has sold 300 tickets so far, though it take more than a year and a half before they can get you to space. World View Enterprises offers a different approach – a pressurized capsule will be ballooned up the suborbital flight while it slowly glide back to earth. Just like a plane, beverages are served while you go down, which lasts about four hours.
The Zero-G Weightless Experience on the other hand will take you up a modified Boeing 727 where it will follow a parabolic arc flight pattern to stimulate the weightlessness of space. It charges a more reasonable $4,950 price – a far cheaper option to its competitors.

If you belong to the wealthy and elite, you can shelve out $20 million to get on the SpaceX Dragon Space Trip that you go and board the International Space Station.
Don’t worry, there are free options as well – you can simply volunteer for the Mars One project that will be the first batch of human visiting the red planet. Training and flights are free, but we’re not sure if you can go back to Earth.

The problem though is that space is an unconquered territory and its vastness only means we’ve barely tapped on how and what it could do to the human body. Sure, movies like Interstellar make it look easier, but in reality, careful planning is needed to make the mission a success.
But missions like these are already facing setbacks. Just a few months ago, a VSS Enterprise test flight from Virgin Galactic resulted in the death of one pilot and another one who is critically injured. The spacecraft broke in midair and until now they are still trying to know the exact reason for the ‘anomaly’.

The way we see it, the future is still uncertain for space tourism since a plethora of factors is still being considered to make it safe for human travel. Sooner or later, flights that you will be booking won’t be to another country, but mostly likely to another planet. I sure hope they’ll have discount deals for that.