Text: Konstantin Andreev IN LAST YEARS, SPACE TOURISM FROM THE FIELD OF SCIENTIFIC FANTASY WAS SURE TO STEP INTO THE DIRECTION OF DAILY REALITY. PRICES ARE FALLING FROM BILLSHIPS TO COMPLETELY ACCEPTABLE, AND THE CONSUMER FINALLY GOT THE OPPORTUNITY TO CHOOSE WHICH THE COMPANY WILL FLY. Well, the Center for Space Tourism, most likely, will move to the Arab Emirates in the coming years.
Through hardship to the stars
The idea of private space flights with recreational purposes appeared only six years after the flight of Yuri Gagarin. And she appeared at the German engineer Kraft Arnold Ericke, who after the war was invited to work in the United States, where he was involved, in particular, with the development of the Lockheed Suntan rocket stratoplan, the forerunner of space shuttles.
Having shown himself to be more a visionary than a designer, in the 60s, Erica retired from practical activities, began to give lectures and write books on the theory of space research. In 1967, his lectures on the creation of orbital stations enthralled Barron Hilton, the son of the founder of the largest hotel empire and amateur aviator, so much that he invited the master to become partners. Well, grandfather Paris Hilton, who knew how to count in his mind, decided to start small - say, with space tourism. A business plan was drawn up, but the matter did not move further: space was then closed to private owners, like a theater of war. The idea of space tourism returned only two decades later, after the rise of the Iron Curtain and the reduction of strategic nuclear arsenals on both sides of the ocean. In October 1986, at the 37th International Aerospace Congress in Innsbruck, British scientists Patrick Collins and David Ashford made a presentation entitled "The Economic Potential of Space Tourism." Shortly before that, the US government announced a competition for the vacancy of the first amateur astronaut. By that time, the Challenger shuttles had already completed over 50 flights, and the flight into orbit seemed safe and even comfortable. In the spring of 1985, President George W. Bush announced the name of the winner — a 36-year-old New Hampshire teacher, Krista McAuliffe. She became the seventh crew member and died with everyone in the shuttle explosion over the Atlantic at the 73rd second after the start. It is known that Steve Jobs previously claimed her place, but fate decreed otherwise. After this tragedy in the United States, spaceflight for civilians was banned.
After one of the space superpowers left the game, the idea of commercial flights into orbit was enthusiastically picked up in Russia. On December 2, 1990, the 48-year-old Japanese television journalist Toyohiro Akiyama was the first to go into space on a commercial basis. The next to take a walk into the "Russian space" went 28-year-old Helen Sherman from the UK. By this time, flights were already carried out at a rate of $ 20 million. A chemist at a confectionery factory with a doctorate from the University of Sheffield has entered orbit through the international project "Juneau".
The first space tourist to pay for his flight on his own was Dennis Tito, a 60-year-old American businessman of Italian origin. On April 28, 2001, he went to the ISS (Mir was already drowned in the ocean by that time) and was very pleased with the flight. Inspired by his example, other representatives of the “golden billion” also pulled into space, which prompted Roskosmos in 2007 to raise the price for a basic package of services to $ 35 million and offer, in addition to this, an optional spacewalk for 15 million tourists. it didn’t bother, and Excell and Word developer, Charles Simoni, a billionaire of Hungarian origin, managed to fly into space at new rates even twice. The marriage contract, concluded in 2008 with the Swedish model Lisa Persdotter, forbade him from flying for life. Among other tourists on the ISS was noted in 2009 as Guy Laliberte - the founder of Cirque du Soleil.
The sky is getting closer
The idea of a radical reduction in the cost of private space travel was born, as usual, in the head of Richard Branson. By 2004, the successful practice of Virgin Airlines made it possible for its owner to think in this direction not abstractly, but quite professionally from an aerospace point of view. As a result, a team of like-minded people was formed, which, in particular, included the American aircraft designer Bert Rutan, and the company Virgin Galactic was founded, which announced short-term space flights for only 250 thousand dollars.
Judging rightly that the “Russian standard” of space tourism at that time provided for unlimited weightlessness in an orbit 384 km high in exchange for $ 35 million and a pleasure to go without a shower for a week, Branson offered a rather daring alternative. It is worth mentioning that this idea has long been practiced by the Russian Air Force as part of the pre-flight training of astronauts. An IL-76 MDK military transport aircraft ascended into the atmosphere to a height of about 9 km and dived from there on a parabola, providing passengers with about 20 seconds of real weightlessness in a passenger compartment that was prudently upholstered with a soft coating.
In Russia, such a tour can now be bought by anyone who has passed a medical examination. Cost - about 30 thousand dollars for a group of 15 people. Virgin Galactic, backed up by NASA in 2007, began to offer a cross between a week-long vacation on the ISS and a 20-second weightlessness in the diving four-engine Ilyushin. At the beginning of the flight, the White Knight two-fuselage carrier carrier aircraft enters Bert Rutan’s Space Ship spacecraft orbit 15 km high, which takes off vertically, reaching the boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere, and soars for several minutes in open space, providing the crew and passengers with the most true zero gravity, after which it returns. Complete sealing of the cab and pressure control systems allow you to do without spacesuits.
The first modification of the spaceship was like a fat imperial Star Wars fighter - with folding wings, hybrid engines and as many portholes of different diameters, as if a four-year-old child was drawing a project. All this did not stop on September 29, 2004, pilot Mike Melville to raise the triple Space Ship One to a height of 102 km, and on October 4 of that year, Brian Binny surpassed this achievement, reaching the 112-kilometer mark. The state of zero gravity in this flight lasted three minutes.
Encouraged by the success of the test spacecraft, Branson and Rutan set about creating Space Ship Two - a full-size model that can take on board six passengers. Starting from this moment, offices of Virgin Galactic tour operators began to open around the world, today they have collected over 150 deposits totaling about $ 40 million. In Moscow in the summer of 2009, at the gas stations along Kutuzovsky Prospekt, stacks of colorful booklets lay on the front page of which an impressive man in a white suit smiled - someone Igorek, the exclusive Russian distributor of space flights from Virgin.
Test flights from the cosmodrome in the Mojave Desert lasted from March 2010 to January 2014. According to the developers, the spaceship is able to reach speeds of Mach 3 (3,704 km / s), reach 130 km altitude and provide passengers with six minutes of zero gravity. The first space flight was announced for Christmas 2014 from the cosmodrome in New Mexico - Richard Branson and Burt Rutan themselves, as well as their family members, will participate in it.
Into orbit from the Emirates
At the end of April, Virgin Galactic Executive Director George Whiteside told the press that starting in 2016, the company will operate its suborbital flights from the cosmodrome, which is being built in Abu Dhabi. They say that this complex was designed by Norman Foster's architectural bureau. Instead of a rocket launch pad, there will be a three-kilometer runway for dispersal and landing of a carrier aircraft and a space module. In addition to traveling into orbit, Virgin Galactic also plans to operate regular super-fast flights between the continents from the Abu Dhabi launch site. So, the flight from Abu Dhabi to New York will take only an hour.
The developer of the project is the local company Aabar Investments, a partner and shareholder of Virgin Galactic, which has a 37.8% stake in Branson and has already invested more than $ 300 million in it. Mr. Whiteside also noted that without the support of Aabar Investments, the first suborbital space ship could not would be realized so soon, and in gratitude for this, Virgin Galactic will provide one ticket for the first commercial flight to an OAU citizen, which will be selected on a competitive basis. The Space Run television contest, which will be hosted by Mark Barnett, will start shortly and will be held in the form of a reality show on the night air of NBC. The winner (or winner) will fly into space at the beginning of 2015 in a company with such stars as Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Katy Perry and Justin Timberlake.
Believing themselves to be the birth monitors of another niche monopolist will be pleasantly disappointed - last November in Dubai, a press conference was held by Space Expedition Corporation (SXC) from the Netherlands, which announced the launch of regular space flights in the III quarter of 2014 on board the Lynx spacecraft. This shuttle, illuminated by Ax deodorant advertisements, powered by conventional jet kerosene, starting off the ground and reaching suborbital heights, was built and tested for 13 years at Excor Aerospace, a California-based company created by former NASA employees. At a press conference, SXC also announced Alchemy Tours as its travel agent in Dubai.
Tickets for flights from the Mojave Cosmodrome (another spaceport will start operating next year - on the Caribbean island of Curacao) have already been bought by 250 people, including rocker Bob Geldof, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and a resident of Dubai who wanted to remain incognito. The cost of the tour is 367 thousand dirhams (about US $ 100,000). For this amount, the passenger of a two-seater shuttle at a speed of 4 thousand km / h will rise to a height of 103 km, where the spaceship will “freeze” for 6 minutes, and then dive back. The flight time is one hour, and in addition to six minutes of zero gravity, it includes 20 seconds of 4G overload. The passenger sitting in the seat of the co-pilot, promised the opportunity to steer during a circular maneuver.
