‘Backyard Inventors’ Help Usher in the Era of Space Travel
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 07.02.07 | 11:30 AM ET
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
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
