Space Tourism
The Final Frontier?

What's left to do when you've been everywhere? There's space tourism, of course, unless you've already been there, done that. For most people though, space remains the final frontier.

People have been flying into space for centuries - at least in their minds and through science fiction. It is a respectable genre which dates back centuries, at least as far back as Thomas More's Utopia and later Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.

Science fiction really came into its own in the 20th century as science and inventions fired up our parents' and grandparents' imaginations through writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. And remember those comic books - Superman and Batman? Science fiction too.

Until very recently private space flight was a bit out there, a fanciful flight of the imagination, and certainly not anything we'd see in our lifetimes. Certainly astronauts would reach the stars, but not everyday women and men.

All this changed in April 2001 when the world's first space tourist, an American businessman, spent a week on the International Space Station (at a modest cost of US$20 million). Today, private space flight is actually a reality. You can simply buy a ticket and hop into space - more or less.

The main company ferrying space tourists is Space Adventures. It organizes 400-km trips for civilians to the space station on Soviet Soyuz craft (they take about three-and-a-half hours to get there but lengthy months of training to qualify) and is the first company to do so. If that's a bit beyond what you'd like to try, they also offer a zero-gravity experience in a specially outfitted aircraft for a modest $5000 - space travel without the space, or the travel. Just the sensation of being Supergirl for a while.

Snapping at its heels is Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, with hopes of becoming the world's first private space airline when it starts using its own spaceships to fly people 62 miles/100 km into space from a dedicated base in New Mexico. Want a ticket? Just contact one of dozens of Accredited Space Agents worldwide. Oh, and don't forget to prepare your $200,000. A little steep? The competition is on - Space Adventures offers a sub-orbital flight at half the price.

As more people sign up - and they are lining up to do so - prices will come down even further.

The day you actually end up in space, you may find a few things there that are still a faraway dream for now - just like travel to outer space used to be. A space hotel, for instance, where you'll spend the night gazing down upon Earth.

But for now, although it's being explored, space tourism is really all about the final frontier. Or is that time travel now...

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