Space: The final vacation
Published: 21 Mar 2001 11:32 GMT
When the day-to-day grind weighs too heavily on your shoulders, a holiday is often the perfect solution. But what if even a luxury cruise doesn't lighten your burden? Well, maybe you need a weightless vacation in space.
The Space Island Group is a private company with an ambitious plan to turn the science-fiction dream into a reality. It hopes to bring industry, commerce, and tourism together with the first in a series of privately owned, low-gravity orbiting space stations, beginning as early as 2004. A getaway complete with low-gravity dancing and sports, radio-controlled space walks for orbital meditation, and a "work the station" package are on the drawing boards.
While it may sound like a pie-in-the-sky notion, the company's vision is based on a 25-year-old idea that comes from NASA itself.
The basic building block for the Space Island Group's proposed commercial space stations is the main fuel tank used by NASA's space shuttle. This huge container, roughly the same size as a 747 without the wings, sits between the two booster rockets when the shuttle blasts off. According to Space Island Group, these tanks are the largest and strongest individual objects brought into space.
Currently, when the shuttle's done with the tank, it gets dumped into an orbit that sends it back to Earth, where it burns up on re-entry. But back in the 70s, when the shuttle program was first being developed, a group of NASA's engineers argued that the shuttle tanks should be left in order to serve the dual purpose of becoming the building blocks for space stations. With minor modifications, they argued, the tanks could be built with docking ports that would allow passage between them.
Eventually, crews could retrofit the interiors to make them habitable, and a series of space stations could be built from the empty tanks. One hundred shuttle flights later, the tanks are still being disposed of in orbit.
The reuse of fuel-tank technology was given credence by the success of Skylab, the first US space station, which was built inside an empty Apollo rocket fuel tank. The Space Island Group is looking at several different ways to turn a used shuttle fuel tank into a place to live. The first design, dubbed Geode, would divide a single tank into a multistoried tower, with different floors for living, working, and storage.
Geode station would be the base station and fuel storage container for the construction of other Space Island stations. Wheel stations, first proposed by NASA engineers in the 70s, would consist of 12 to 16 tanks connected in a circle, with one or more tank units as the central hub. It is this wheel station design, which the Space Island group hopes to have up and running by 2007, that will house the space hotel.
While the company's management touts the benefits of low-gravity commercial stations and larger zero-gravity environments to the manufacturing, electronics, and scientific research industries, it is also eager to explore the tourism and recreational potentials of space stations.
On a recent trip to New York, the company visited Kodak, Corning, and Bausch and Lomb because zero gravity offers an unparalleled optics-manufacturing environment. The group also stopped in at the Rochester Institute of Technology to talk tech and tourism. RIT has been offering the nation's first course in space tourism development for several years now and is considering a degree program in the same area.
Just like an ocean cruise Gene Meyers, Space Island's president, and Dr Francis M Domoy, chair of RIT's School of Food and Hospitality Management assert that the skills and infrastructure needed to run a hotel in space are similar to those of cruise ships. Meyers believes that 99.5 percent of the station's air, food, and water could be recycled and that much of the food could be grown and/or produced on the station as well.
While chicken and fish dishes are likely to be plentiful on the hotel's menu, beef is likely to be less common since it will need to be brought up from earth rather than raised in space. The big question: will the hotel make Jim Henson's Pigs in Space a reality?
The cost for initial trips to the Space Hotel will be stratospheric. Hotel layout and pricing will be similar to those of cruise ships. The hotel will offer large, big-ticket suites with views and smaller internal cabins for the budget conscious.
Initially, the room rates will be based on a daily cubic foot rate of $25 (£17.51) per cubic foot. Meyers predicts that the rate will eventually drop to $2 per cubic foot, enabling the well heeled of the world to book four to five-day vacations and round-trip passage for around $25,000 (£17,514) per person.
The wheel stations would spin at one rotation per minute, providing about one-third of Earth's gravity. This is enough to prevent the negative effects of a zero-gravity environment while allowing for a raft of new experiences.
You and your partner could truly be light on your feet as you danced the night away carrying only a fraction of your Earth-bound payload. Eager about the potential for low-gravity sports, Meyers envisions building a sports arena in one of the first completed tanks. Imagine the next generation of Olympic gymnasts dismounting the uneven parallel bars in low gravity. Or how about new sports built around the low-gravity environment?
The Space Island Group isn't beyond exploring the artistic possibilities either. The company is discussing a commission with Cirque du Soleil for a piece to be performed in space, as well as proposing a recording studio with a view of space to inspire composers and talking about television production. Aerospace developer SpaceHab was exhibiting a television production studio module for the International Space Station last year and has formed a spin-off company, Space Media, to pursue space-based productions.
So start saving now for that vacation in space. Can't wait until the space hotel is up and rates have dropped to that affordable £17,514 price tag? The Space Island Group has been talking about creating everything, from models to a full-sized mock-up of its space station as a new tourist attraction in, of all places, Las Vegas.
Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Click on the TalkBack button and go to the ZDNet News forum.
Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom. And read what others have said.
Did you find this article useful?
21 out of 37 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
