In the middle of the desert at the Mojave Air and Space Port, there is a race underway: a race to build a spaceship that will take tourists into space. Two spaceships are leading the pack, Virgin Galactic’s ‘SpaceShip 2’ and XCOR Aerospace’s ‘Lynx’.
“What we want to do is open up space flight to humanity. And so what that means is making the wondrous experience of spaceflight available to you and me,” says Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides.
Jeff Greason, co-founder of XCOR Aerospace, agrees. “We could enter a phase of human history like what happened before with the opening of the New World.”
Although there is no official launch date, both companies believe that they’re close to taking off. Test flights are expected to start in late 2013 and commercial flights in 2014.
Each company offers a different experience.
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Virgin Galactic’s ‘SpaceShip 2’ is described by Whitesides as looking like “a fighter jet and a rocket ship married together”. It seats 6 passengers and two pilots and takes off horizontally, like an airplane. SpaceShip 2 soars 100 kilometers above Earth to the official limits of space. At that point, passengers can unbuckle their seatbelts to experience weightlessness for a few minutes. The flight, from take off to landing, lasts about two hours.
By comparison, XCOR Aerospace’s ‘Lynx’ is smaller than most personal business jets. It’s built for two, one pilot and one passenger, and offers a cockpit perspective usually reserved for pilots. The flight is shorter than on Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship, at around 60 minutes, but offers about same amount of time in space.
Tickets aren’t cheap. Fly with Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship and it’ll cost you $200,000. Take the ‘Lynx’ and it’ll be about half that, at $100,000. So far, over 500 people have signed up with Virgin Galactic. XCOR Aerospace started selling tickets earlier this year through Space Expedition Corporation.
Both Whitesides and Greason admit with new technology comes new risks. Bu those risks haven’t stopped Canadian Sergio Pio from wanting to sign up as a future astronaut. An experienced traveler, he says going to space is a dream come true.
“When I was 5 I was saying that I wanted to be an astronaut, and people laugh,” Pio says. “Now it’s real, I can be a part of this.”
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