Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
The Clymo Brief: Everyday astronauts
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In a week when the Ministry of Defence released secret files on UFO sightings and Microsoft unveiled its WorldWide Telescope, it seems we’re more fascinated than ever by what goes on in the sky above us.

But have you ever considered going into space? I’m fast coming round to the idea. Not as a 'proper' astronaut, of course, but as a tourist. Space tourism - once considered a thing of fantasy - now looks likely to happen, and possibly within the next couple of years. Mind you, it’ll take me a few light years to save up for the astronomical ticket prices.

Tourist flights
Competition is already fierce with a handful of companies vying to become inter-galactic people carriers of the future. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bulk of them are based in America, although there are also contenders as far afield as Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.
However, right now only the Russian Space Agency offers such flights. These are aboard a Soyuz craft and include disembarkation at the International Space Station. The bookings are actually taken via Space Adventures, an entrepreneurial American ‘space tourism’ company which also plans altogether more ambitious missions around the Moon. A seat on one of those can be yours for only $100 million.

Image gallery: Space junk

Be honest though. Would you really blast off into orbit even for a day trip, let alone a fortnight’s holiday?

High price
Well, it’s already happened for millionaire Californian Dennis Tito who became the world’s first bona fide space tourist in 2001, spending in the region of $20 million to do it. Mind you, he did attract criticism for hitching his lift with the Russians. Since then, only a handful of other wealthy individuals have been lucky enough to do the same.
Unfortunately, those of us keen to explore space but faced with a rather more limited budget will not be comforted by current pricing estimates. Virgin Galactic still look like favourites to get fare-paying bums on seats come their proposed launch date sometime in 2009. Tickets are expected to be around $200,000 a pop, but they already have several rivals.

For example, the Californian company XCOR Aerospace recently unveiled their craft – a two seater sub-orbital affair. Tickets for that are said to be priced around $100,000. On the downside, this is a shorter and less involved tour to the edge of space. The Virgin Galactic experience promises a longer, faster and higher spectacle and you’ll be able to share it with five other ‘tourists’ plus two crew members. Very cosy.
Quick flit
Of course, these are just quick flits into space. In fact, the majority of these proposed space flights will last for a matter of minutes and peak, at best, at an altitude of approximately 160 kilometres up. That’s far enough to look down on the curvature of the Earth and it’s plenty past the Karman Line at 100 kilometres up, the so-called boundary line between the earth’s atmosphere and outer space, to qualify as a sub-orbital spaceflight.

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But what about the concept of a proper holiday in space, holed up in a resort streaking round the planets? Don’t think it’s daft. You can already find plenty of companies working hard on their concepts for inter-planetary lodges, hotels and even full-blown resorts in space.

It’s an amazing notion but I wonder what the reality will be. Let’s face it, back here on Earth, most airports have become overcrowded, inefficient versions of Hell itself. If we end up with a space station managed anything like the Heathrow Terminal 5 fiasco then you’ll be wearing the same underwear while you’re up there because your luggage will be on Uranus. Or maybe you don’t wear underwear in a space suit? I’ll look it up and let you know.
Worse still, just imagine if they allow mobiles on the space ship just as they want to do with commercial airline flights. In space nobody can hear you scream - until you get stuck next to an idiot with a phone glued to their ear on a trip round the solar system.

Space elevator
Personally, I rather fancy getting to my orbiting motel using the more sedate concept of the space elevator, an idea which originally appeared too fantastic for words. First imagined by Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky back in 1895, authors like David Gerrold and Terry Pratchett have also featured the idea in print, and even Arthur C Clarke mentioned it in his novel The Fountains of Paradise. However, this fascinating concept could end up being a lot more than just science-fiction.

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The elevator would be located somewhere near the equator because this is the quietest area that falls between the Hadley Cells circulation system, thereby meaning less challenging atmospheric conditions. Its cable could be constructed from carbon nanotubes, while the elevator and its attached cord would be engineered to successfully fend off impacts from meteoroids and other space debris.

A handful of companies are already working hard on their own designs for the space elevator, so it’s certainly not a pipe dream. Again though, if such a thing ever came to fruition, what would the end result be like?

I hope it won’t be like the elevator in my local supermarket car park, which only spans two floors but doubles as a very public urinal and manages to break down every other day. Imagine enduring that stench all the way into orbit. Worse still, what happens if it stops climbing halfway up a 100,000 kilometre cable? Let’s hope they add a panic button…


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Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.