The era when travelers will be able to catch a flight from New Mexico to outer space moved a step closer this week with the official start of construction of Spaceport America.
So here we were at 6:20 Monday morning at Los Angeles International Airport. Despite the hour, a disc jockey played pulsing club music, a soundtrack that soon continued onboard a Virgin America Airbus with "My Other Ride is a Spaceship" emblazoned behind its nose. A 20-minute flight later, the jet landed in Mojave, Calif., where tycoon Richard Branson awaited.
As a female voice coos, "Welcome to space," six passengers in skintight spacesuits unbuckle their seatbelts and somersault in zero gravity, occasionally peeking back at Earth through the private spaceship's large portholes.
An explosion at an airport home to Scaled Composites -- the builder of the first private manned rocket to reach space -- killed two people and left four seriously hurt Thursday, a Kern County Fire Department official says.
Jim Benson's ship is called the Dream Chaser, and here's the dream he's chasing: a 50 percent profit margin on revenue of $200 million by 2015 from putting tourists into suborbital space.
A mere three years after Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne skimmed the edge of space to capture the $10-million Ansari X Prize, more than half a dozen companies are furiously building and testing spacecraft designed to take paying passengers on suborbital journeys and beyond.
The era when travelers will be able to catch a flight from New Mexico to outer space moved a step closer this week with the official start of construction of Spaceport America.
So here we were at 6:20 Monday morning at Los Angeles International Airport. Despite the hour, a disc jockey played pulsing club music, a soundtrack that soon continued onboard a Virgin America Airbus with "My Other Ride is a Spaceship" emblazoned behind its nose. A 20-minute flight later, the jet landed in Mojave, Calif., where tycoon Richard Branson awaited.
As a female voice coos, "Welcome to space," six passengers in skintight spacesuits unbuckle their seatbelts and somersault in zero gravity, occasionally peeking back at Earth through the private spaceship's large portholes.
An explosion at an airport home to Scaled Composites -- the builder of the first private manned rocket to reach space -- killed two people and left four seriously hurt Thursday, a Kern County Fire Department official says.
Jim Benson's ship is called the Dream Chaser, and here's the dream he's chasing: a 50 percent profit margin on revenue of $200 million by 2015 from putting tourists into suborbital space.
A mere three years after Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne skimmed the edge of space to capture the $10-million Ansari X Prize, more than half a dozen companies are furiously building and testing spacecraft designed to take paying passengers on suborbital journeys and beyond.
"I never think of the future" Albert Einstein once said, "It comes soon enough". But at the beginning of the 21st Century even the great scientist might have been taken aback by the pace of scientific and engineering advances of recent times.
Space tourism is being packaged as the ultimate trip -- almost as an extension of a normal flight but with incredible views, the experience of weightlessness and supersonic speeds. Companies such as Virgin Galactic are taking bookings from the rich and famous for the sub-orbital flights they hope to start in 2008.
Space tourism is being packaged as the ultimate trip -- almost as an extension of a normal flight but with incredible views, the experience of weightlessness and supersonic speeds.
Who hasn't looked up at the stars and wondered what it must be like to travel through space? Only a fortunate few have made the trip, and at enormous cost. But soon, the excitement and adventure may be within reach of many more of us.
A note from Erick Schonfeld: After six years of writing Future Boy, I'm handing the reins to my colleague Chris Taylor to focus on features for the magazine and my B2Day blog, which you can also subscribe to by e-mail or RSS. Taylor shares my interest in the Internet and new media, but he's also interested in other boundaries of technology, like space, the subject of his first Future Boy column.
I MUST SAY THAT I'M A LITTLE DISAPPOINTED IN RICHARD Branson. After all this time as one of the world's highest-profile entrepreneurs, he's only now beginning to deal in the world's two most precio...
Ticket to ride commuter flights to the edge of space may not be too far off -- with spaceliners departing several spaceports here in the United States.
One of only two people to pay their own way into space says space tourism will become an integral part of the industry, eventually leading to more trips to the moon.
SpaceShipOne achieved its most spectacular flight yet, climbing to an altitude of 377,591 feet (71 1/2 miles) to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize on Monday.
I'm not a huge fan of technology and I sometimes wonder whether it has had such a big impact on our lives. But one thing that has changed the way that I do business is the mobile phone.
British entrepreneur Richard Branson has announced his company has signed a deal to offer the world's first commercial flights to space under the branding "Virgin Galactic."
Thirty years after Alan Shepard's lunar tee shot, entrepreneurs in the earthly business of tourism are looking up toward that back nine in the sky. Forget the right stuff--all tourists need is abou...
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