Three, two, one - Commence bragging!

A quick and easy trip into space may be the next frontier for the been-there-done-that traveller

MATTHEW TREVISAN

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

July 18, 2007 at 9:18 AM EDT

It took John Criswick less than a week to make his decision. It was something he had always wanted to do, ever since his parents bought him a telescope when he was 10. Never mind that it cost $200,000 to get there. He wanted to bring some adventure back into his life.

He would go to space.

"I like to have a little bit of risk and not be able to predict what's going to happen," said the 43-year-old CEO of Magmic Games, an Ottawa-based company that publishes and develops games for cellphones and BlackBerrys. "It's not just about the launch. A bunch of things are going to happen to me between now and then because of it."

Criswick is one of four Canadians who have signed up for Virgin Galactic's trips to space, slated to start in late 2009 or early 2010. Worldwide, almost 200 people in 30 countries have signed up for the 2½-hour trip to the final frontier.

To promote this nascent industry in Canada, Virgin Galactic has appointed five Canadian travel consultants who will act as sales representatives for the London-based arm of the Virgin Group of companies. Last week, Virgin's head of astronaut sales, Carolyn Wincer, trained the "accredited space agents" in Vancouver and visited them in their respective cities.

"It's a unique product to sell and one that's quite complicated, with a lot of unusual questions and one that not a lot of people know about," she said from the company's Toronto office.

Right now, it seems Virgin will take anyone willing to slap down a $20,000 (all figures U.S.) refundable deposit for the trip. There are no prerequisites other than "good health and reasonable fitness."

"The problem is that until now, nobody's monitored normal, everyday people undergoing G-forces," Wincer said. "The only people that are monitored are people training to be fighter pilots, and they are already trained to be in peak condition.

"So we hope to know more very soon ... but having said that, the G-force profile is nowhere near what fighter pilots and astronauts going to the moon have had to undergo. It should be fairly okay."

Travellers will experience a maximum of 3.5 Gs during their brief sojourn to space, Wincer said. Fighter pilots regularly experience about nine Gs, and even intense roller coasters can generate five.

This fall, Virgin will be sending the first 100 customers to human centrifuge training in Philadelphia, where specialists will test their ability to withstand G-force pressures, which can cause blackouts and even redouts, in which capillaries in the eyes burst.

"After those first 100, the goal is that they can just turn up a few days before a flight and do it," Wincer said.

Make space travel simple: That's what British billionaire Richard Branson, the Virgin Group's founder, had in mind when he partnered with Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer who designed the company's spacecraft, SpaceShipOne.

The vehicle was the winner of the $10-million Ansari X Prize, a competition for the first reusable, non-government, manned spacecraft.

Virgin will take its travellers on a brief, sub-orbital flight that reaches its peak 110 kilometres above Earth. They won't go fast enough to go into orbit, so the trip is essentially like throwing a gigantic ball into a parabolic arc and having it float safely to the ground.

The travellers will undergo a medical assessment six months before their flight. Wincer said they fly at their own risk and go through a process of "informed consent" before signing a waiver.

"At each stage, we advise what we know and what we don't know, and likewise the passenger has to advise the same thing," she said.

After two days of psychological, safety and G-force training, a mother ship will take the travellers' spaceship on a 40-minute flight to an altitude of 15,240 metres (the cruising altitude of the now-retired Concorde jet) and then release it.

The spaceship, full of viewing windows, will freefall for a few seconds before firing its rockets, which will propel it to more than 1,600 kilometres an hour and out of the atmosphere.

Once the rockets shut off, the spaceship will reach its maximum altitude, at which point the passengers will experience as much as five minutes of weightlessness.

From there, the spaceship begins a 90-second re-entry phase, creating drag in an effort to re-enter the atmosphere more slowly than a regular rocket. After re-entry, it will take 45 minutes to glide down from 21,300 metres.

Once the tourist flights begin, Virgin Galactic hopes to operate one flight daily. The company will have a fleet of five spaceships and two mother ships. Each spaceship holds six passengers and two pilots, and the entire fleet will cost $20-million.

Wincer says the extravagant cost will come down as more companies start to send tourists into space.

(European firm Astrium recently announced it wants to build a rocket-powered craft to send tourists to an altitude of 100 kilometres by 2012 for about $268,000.)

And, she adds, Virgin's price is a bargain compared with the $20-million that Space Adventures Ltd. charged travellers to join a Russian flight to the International Space Station 400 kilometres above Earth.

To finance his trip, Criswick will use the fortune he made in 1998 when Sun Microsystems bought his company, Beduin Communications, which designed software for consumer electronics.

For those who think they've seen it all, Wincer says, space travel is something genuinely new.

"These days travel is so easy and accessible. Even if you don't have that much money you can often have travel experiences. So to some people, particularly those with money, it's all a bit mundane."

For his part, Criswick has had some experience with the space industry.

The Vancouver native worked as a software developer on a telescope that was eventually launched in 1991 aboard a U.S. spacecraft. That research led to a master's degree at York University. He tried out for the second Canadian astronaut competition but didn't make it because, he jokes, "I didn't have enough PhDs." And he attended a summer session at the International Space University in 1991, where he met some friends who joined him in June 2004 to watch Mike Melvill fly SpaceShipOne over California's Mojave Desert.

He likes to call his trip a path of self-discovery.

"I'm not excited because it's so far away. But I'm sure two or three months before [the trip] my level of anxiety and excitement is definitely going to change."

Wincer adds that anyone who has been to space has returned "almost certainly a confirmed environmentalist" because of the view of Earth and its atmosphere.

"And because we're taking some of the richest people in the world up, who are also some of the most powerful people, we think that might have some positive effects for our planet."

For more information about Virgin Galactic's space flights, visit virgingalactic.com; to book a seat, visit http://www.virtuoso.com.