It’s like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A French air hostess opened the winning candy wrapper in a contest to rocket into space and experience five minutes of weightlessness. She called it “a dream come true.” Are there Oompa-Loompas in space?

Related on World Hum:
* Meet Eric Anderson, Space Tourism Middleman

Or, in Chinese, “Aoyun.” Reports the BBC: “It is not uncommon for Chinese children to be given names of common events and popular slogans—such as Defend China, Build the Nation and Space Travel.” Mr. Space Travel—has a nice ring to it.

Robert Laine, chief technical officer of EADS, says his company plans to build a production line for its space planes in order “to satisfy the space tourism market,” reports the BBC. From the story: “Its market assessment suggests there would be 15,000 people a year prepared to part with some 200,000 euros (£160,000) for the ride of a lifetime.”

Continue reading >>

Designs for SpaceShipTwo (pictured), the craft Virgin Galactic plans to use to take travelers into space as early as 2009, were shown publicly for the first time at a press conference today in New York. Virgin Galactic’s Web site has many other images of the beautiful ship and its carrier plane, WhiteKnightTwo—if you’re patient enough to give the page time to load. It seems to be overwhelmed with traffic this afternoon. 

Continue reading >>

Richard Garriott, a game designer and the world’s next space tourist, and Eric Anderson, CEO of the company that’s helping to send him there, Space Adventures, spoke about the future of space travel today on the Kojo Nnamdi Show. The 30-minute segment is in the WAMU archives.

Related on World Hum:
* Meet Eric Anderson, Space Tourism Middleman

Photo of Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon courtesy of NASA.

From a USA Today story by Robert Davis: “In the latest space race—to lift paying customers out of Earth’s atmosphere—aviation safety regulators occupy a new niche: They are promoting an industry expected to suffer deadly accidents instead of applying strict safety rules.” It’s a function of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, which, according to Davis, treats the industry “more like an adventure business than an air carrier.”

Continue reading >>

If you have an extra $30 million or so, you can buy a ticket on a Russian spacecraft and sing among the stars. And the man best suited for making your space travel dreams come true? A 33-year-old Northern Virginia-based entrepreneur named Eric Anderson, who has already sold five such trips to business moguls and has been credited with revitalizing the interest in private space vacations, according to a recent profile in USA Today. 

Continue reading >>

In all the hoopla this week around the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, it was one passage from the Economist that, for my taste, put the legacy of the satellite into perspective. “In the 1950s many people imagined that in the decades to come the new frontier would be beaten back by pioneers bent on interplanetary colonisation. By the end of the millennium there would be a moon base at the very least. Probably, there would be hotels in orbit...As it turned out...[p]eople have hardly travelled anywhere at all...Instead...most of the satellites in orbit round Earth look down, rather than up, and the biggest mental change wrought by spaceflight has been not an appreciation of the vastness of the universe, but rather of the smallness, fragility and unity of Earth.”

Related on World Hum:
* Space Traveler ‘Didn’t Even Visit the Moon, for Christ’s Sake’
* ‘Galactic Suite’ Space Hotel Planned for Earth Orbit

Photo by NASA.

The Onion takes aim at space tourism this week with a story headlined Space Tourist Spends Entire Vacation Inside Space Shuttle. As the made-up source says about his made-up friend, the space traveler, “What’s the point of training for months and traveling 3 million miles if you’re just going to sit around some orbital craft all day?” Looks like the Onion is on the same page as I am.

Related on World Hum:
* ‘Galactic Suite’ Space Hotel Planned for Earth Orbit
* ‘Backyard Inventors’ Help Usher in the Era of Space Travel

Photo via NASA. 

Not just any hotel. A boutique, pod hotel, according to Galactic Suite Limited director Xavier Claramunt. The “pod structure, which makes it look like a model of molecules, was dictated by the fact that each pod room had to fit inside a rocket to be taken into space,” writes Pascale Harter in a Reuters story. Galactic Suite says guests will use Velcro suits that stick to the walls in order to move through the hotel. For the privilege, it plans to charge $4 million for a three-day stay, as well as “eight weeks of intensive training at a James Bond-style space camp on a tropical island,” Harter writes. I’m not quite sure what a James Bond-style space camp might involve (Gadgets? Martinis? Leggy women with punny names?), but I have a feeling the training session could be more fun than spending three days cramped in a pod, wearing a Velcro suit.

Related on World Hum:
* ‘Backyard Inventors’ Help Usher in the Era of Space Travel
* The Critics: ‘The Hazards of Space Travel’
* ‘Our Consultants Are Now Very Excited About Selling Space Travel’

Photos of the seven wonders, that is. Bernard Weber, who launched the much hyped, recently completed campaign to name the new seven wonders of the world, says he plans to store 3-D images of the honored monuments on a “golden disk” and then shoot it into space to preserve the monuments “forever.” He told the AP: “I think it would be worthwhile to conserve this memory at the beginning of the third millennium in the best possible way and make sure that even if the world gets destroyed, it will be retained somewhere.”

Continue reading >>

A surge in contests put on by the U.S. government and private sponsors have helped inch us closer to the era of private space travel, according to an interesting story by Jack Hitt in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Hitt centers his piece on Peter K. Homer, “an out-of-work director of a local community center in Maine,” who attempts to build a better space glove for a NASA design contest. “NASA’s competitions arose, in part, from a desire to return to the moon, as well as to hand off part of NASA’s old mission to the private sector—that mission being to make low-orbit space travel a mere extension of planes, trains and automobiles,” Hitt writes. To that end, the Federal Aviation Administration already has begun laying out some rules.

Related on World Hum:
* Win a Trip to Space. Maybe.
* Singapore, United Arab Emirates Jump Into Space Tourism Race
* Neil Armstrong and the Promise of Space Travel

Photo by NASA.