Vacations in Orbit

By Jeffrey Kluger

Buzz Aldrin has a plan for your next vacation. You won't need to fret about getting to the airport because an airport won't be on your itinerary. You won't be deciding what kind of hotel you prefer, since you won't, strictly speaking, have a room. You will have to contend with the possibility that the slightest mishap could mean you'll never come home again. Nonetheless, Buzz is convinced you'll have a good time. And he should know--he's been there. Aldrin, who so famously walked on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission 29 years ago, wants to send you into space. And if he has his way, you'll be going soon.

The idea of space tourism is suddenly hot. It has been 36 years since John Glenn dipped the first American toe into orbit; in the decades since, space travel has become numbingly common--essentially zero-gravity milk runs to ferry cargo up and down. But this very monotony has given Aldrin and others an idea. Now that visiting space is so routine, why shouldn't anyone--even a vacationer--be able to book a seat? Says Aldrin: "We're on the brink of at last democratizing space."

The space-tourism industry is not an entirely new concept. In 1996 a team of entrepreneurs based in St. Louis, Mo., formed an organization called the X Prize Foundation and offered a $10 million award to the first designer to develop a ship able to take passengers into space. The trip the sponsors envision is not much--a suborbital lob shot that would barely nick the skin of space. But a little outer space is still outer space, and since the prize was announced, 15 groups have submitted blueprints.

Aldrin scorns such plans. So modest a passenger spacecraft could carry just a handful of people, which could push the price of even a steerage seat to $100,000. Instead Aldrin prefers a concept that airlines using wide-body planes embraced long ago: carry lots of people at once and drive down the per-passenger cost. To get such an orbital airbus flying, he founded ShareSpace, a nonprofit company designed to help fund and promote mass-market space travel. ShareSpace's vision for cosmic tourism includes Earth-orbiting ships carrying as many as 100 people and clusters of modules that could act as orbiting hotels. "All we have to do," Aldrin says, "is use existing rocket technology and wrap an airplane around it."

Maybe. But one man's vision is another man's fever dream, and to X Prize engineers struggling to achieve a popgun suborbital, Aldrin's ideas may sound loopy. Undaunted, Aldrin and ShareSpace have come up with a plan to raise the capital they need. For $10 or so, contestants could enter a sweepstakes qualifying them to win a range of space-related prizes, including a ride aboard a zero-gravity training plane or a trip in a MiG-25 to the edge of space. Any money left over would be used for the group's advocacy and R.-and-D. mission.

Such wheel-of-fortune funding is not the way the space community usually does business, and Aldrin has been working hard lately to court corporate co-sponsors and round up other lobbying groups to join him in pushing his ideas. He admits ShareSpace may never put a single tourist into orbit, but he has yet to see an alternative he thinks would work better. The old way of doing things got Aldrin into space. It will take a whole new way to get everyone else there.

--By Jeffrey Kluger