Fly Me To The Moon!

Space flight companies are already taking bookings for trips into Earth’s orbit and even around the Moon. Dominic Bliss investigates space tourism

- Dominic Bliss

Later this year, if all goes as planned, two very wealthy amateur astronauts will lift off in a rocket from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A – the same launch pad used by the Apollo missions back in the 1970s – before looping around the Moon and returning to Earth.

This very ambitious mission is being staged by a Californian space flight company called SpaceX. Founded by Elon Musk – he of Tesla and PayPal fame – SpaceX won’t yet reveal very much about the mission, not even the two astronauts’ names; only that they will be launching on a 70-metre-high Falcon Heavy rocket, and then circumnavigating the Moon in a much smaller autonomous Dragon 2 spacecraft.

“This would be a long loop around the Moon,” Musk revealed. “It would skim its surface, go quite a bit further into deep space and then loop back to Earth. So I’m guessing, distance-wise, maybe 3,00,000 or 4,00,000 miles.” The flight is expected to last a week; the price, undisclosed.

Much shorter and less ambitious are the space flights currently planned by British entrepreneur Richard Branson’s space flight company Virgin Galactic. For a US$250,000/₹16,003,750 (return) ticket, ordinary punters will get a trip aboard SpaceShipTwo, a reusable, rocket-powered winged spacecraft with capacity for two pilots and six passengers. The amateur astronauts will fly into space, 60-plus miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, where they will “experience a thrilling, dynamic rocket ride; true unencumbered weightlessness; and the best possible view of Earth and the blackness of space”.

Virgin Galactic wouldn’t commit to a precise launch date for the first commercial flight, but its commercial director Stephen Attenborough did tell Business Traveller: “It’s on the horizon but one can never be entirely certain as to how far away that horizon is.”