Well maybe not this summer, but such ideas might not be fantasy much longer.
"SpaceShipOne, designed by Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, will be carried by a turbojet called White Knight to an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,240 meters)... The craft's designer aims to open up a new space frontier with Monday's launch... If all goes according to plan, it will ignite its rocket engines that propel the craft to Mach 3, three times the speed of sound, and into space. The spacecraft will spend three minutes beyond Earth's atmosphere, becoming the first private craft to carry a human into space and touch down on the same runway it left about an hour and a half earlier." - from the CNN report: Commercial space travel next leap for mankind? by Michael Coren
Rutan and his team are one of twenty teams, from seven different countries, competing for the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first civilian flight in space. The prize was meant to encourage interest in private space travel.
We are on the edge of a breakthrough here. If Rutan succeeds with his flight tomorrow (I assume tomorrow, though the CNN report said "Monday"), or if one of these other teams succeeds soon after, that will bring the idea of space travel that much closer to all of us (well, any of us with money of course, because I can't imagine it will be cheap).
There were a few pieces of information that I didn't find from the article, such as: are these people even allowed to go into space? Do they need special permits, and if so, what kind of agency supplies those? What about an intergalactic pilot's license? Are there rules for this kind of stuff?
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
very fine job on a fascinating topic, very glad you covered this Laura Rae - thanks! That Paul Allen gets around - he's done far more for the world than his former partner Bill Gates.