Dennis Tito's Most
Excellent Adventure
Tito, the California multimillionaire who paid the Russian space agency $20 million for a week's stay aboard Space Station Alpha, spent much of the trip like any other tourist, with his video camera glued to his eye.
I suspect those movies will be considerably more engaging than Grandma and the kids tryimg on Mickey Mouse ears, or Dad riding a burro at the Grand Canyon.
It would be quite an evening: "Oh, look, here's the space shuttle just un-docking -- that's Australia in the background. More popcorn?"
NASA may have gotten its Jockeys in a twist over having company -- in fact, they got downright petty about it when they purposely kept their cameras off Tito during his visit.
But in booking a Soyuz seat for Dennis Tito, the Russians have put a whole new twist on "Space for Rent." We may not start seeing busloads of Elderhostel tourists docking at Alpha's back door anytime soon, but the precedent for recreational space travel has been set.
And there will be more space station guests in the future, apparently. Russia, which agreed to deliver a fresh escape capsule every six months to Alpha, expects to sell more empty third seats on these Soyuz ships on future taxi flights to tourists with a sense of adventure and very deep pockets.
Despite NASA's grumbling, all 16 nations involved in the station project have agreed to study the possibility of commercial flights. NASA itself even published a paper in 1998, titled "General Public Space Travel and Tourism."
However -- having tweaked our American space agency about its inhospitable attitude -- I do have to agree that a busy orbiting science and research lab doesn't make the universe's best bed-and-breakfast. The chocolate kiss just floats up off the pillow, for starters -- and God forbid you should confuse the "Fresh Air" knob and "Depressurize" switch.
No, what Dennis Tito did was the 2001 equivalent of the first man back in the 1920s to sit on a mail sack in a Jenny biplane and become the first airline passenger.
But it wasn't long after that inauspicious jaunt that people with foresight and capital began building larger and more comfortable airplanes, filling them with high-paying adventurers, flying fixed routes on regular schedules -- and the airline industry was born.
Similarly, if commercial space travel is to actually become a reality, today's Bill Gateses, Warren Buffetts, Donald Trumps -- and Dennis Titos -- will have to pool their resources to build the first true space hostelry, hire ex-NASA flight crews to operate them, and arrange transportation for their guests -- most likely, by contracting with the dollar-hungry Russians at first, and later on designing and operating their own space taxis.
Yes, this would not be a vacation Joe Sixpack and the kids could afford -- just as American's and Eastern's and United's first customers tended to be publicity-seeking movie stars and high-rolling tycoons looking for a different ride than their private railcars. But demand drove development, Ford Tri-Motors gave way to DC-3s to Constellations to 747s, five seats became 10 became 20 became 100 became 400, and the economies of scale brought commercial air travel from the realm of adventure for the very rich to the basic and oft-derided basic transportation of today.
There is a demand for general access to space -- 86 percent of the responents to an April 30 CNN poll said they would vacation in space today if money were no object.
People have experienced space vicariously for 40 years, through the Glenns and Bormans and Armstrongs, the Gagarins and Tereshkovas and Leonovs of government space programs. Now they want to find out first-hand what it feels like to shuck the bonds of gravity and float weightless halfway between up and down -- to gaze out a window and see not a flat, dusty landscape, but a round, blue planet -- to marvel at a universe of stars, planets and galaxies un-veiled by Earth's turbulent ocean of air.
It's hard to say how far off that day may be for you and me -- but Dennis Tito's Most Excellent Adventure at least puts flesh and blood on what had until now been a "maybe, someday" concept.
Hey, isn't that Europe? Pass the popcorn.
