BOXLEITNER KEEN TO GO INTO SPACE

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BABYLON 5 star BRUCE BOXLEITNER is desperate for Virgin bosses to drop the price of their upcoming shuttle trip - so he can afford to blast off.
The actor is on the Board Of Directors at the National Space Society but that's not helping him get a cheap space flight when the first Virgin Galactic shuttle takes off in 2010.
He moans, "I wish they'd hurry it along and make it cheaper. I'd love to do it, but it's like $200,000 per person.
"We should get a Screen Actors Guild ride going! I have a feeling it'll be the Scream Actors Guild.
"I've always been fascinated with the wide open spaces; it's the unknown. The closest I've been to space is Babylon 5 but I never actually left the planet." So far, the only celebrities onboard the first flight are Bryan Ferry and former Dallas star Victoria Principal.
Virgin Galactic director Alex Tai has revealed 80,000 people from 120 countries have shown an interest in the first space trip.

Space flight experience at a bargain price

A promotional shot of Virgin Galactic's Spaceship Two.

If a $260,000 flight into space busts your budget then maybe the $23,000 sub-orbital space flight training is more up your alley.

Open to the public for the first time, the simulation has been designed to mimic an intergalactic experience.

Three Australian travel agents have recently returned from the Virgin ASA Global Forum in the US where the Virgin brainchild was launched.

But the ride comes at a cost.

Virgin is planning on putting together half day (about $2030), full day (about $3390) and two-day (about $5645) packages for space junkies.

Edwin Spencer, director of Spencer Travel in Sydney, said that the simulation conveys what a trip in space is like, however the G forces on the ride are a little lower. He thinks that it is worth the cost.

"You get the exact same experience as if you were going to do one of the flights (into space)," Spencer said from the conference in Philadelphia.

"They (Virgin) are trying to promote this facility to give you the experience of what it would be like on a space flight. It's so deadly accurate."

Having said this, Spencer admits that it's not for everyone.

"I think by the time you package it all and you get them over here it's probably going to cost about $20,000, with airfares and accommodation.

"... It's not going to appeal everyone but it's brand spanking new ... it's something really really unique.

"The big boys toys kind of people. The guys that love the adventure."

The travel packages will include the sub-orbital space flight training in Pennsylvania and the longer sessions will also include training on a parabolic flight and fighter pilot training in Las Vegas.

Spencer Travel, accredited as a Virgin Galactic Space Agent, sold Australia's first fully-paid ticket to space last year.

The journey into space takes two and a half hours to fly up 15,240 metres. The mothership then drops the rocket and it is sent soaring to 116,000 metres.

To put it into context, a standard aeroplane flies at about 9000 metres.

Passengers then experience five minutes of weightlessness before being returned to earth.

The $260,000 journey takes just a day but involves two days training.

The first 100 visitors to go into space, deemed Founders by Virgin, are expected to make the trip in 2010. Most positions on the Founders team were invitation only, but one fully-paid female from Australia made the rollcall.

"She is determined to be in the first 100," Spencer said.

The space-loving customer wants to keep a low profile, but Spencer said that she is an adventurer.

He said that space travel hadn't aroused the same excitement here as it had in the US.

"It's not that big in Australia but in the US it's huge," he said.

"This is just the beginning. It's the ultimate experience in life.

"It's that whole concept of being able to see Earth out of the left hand porthole and space from the right hand porthole."

IF YOU GO:

Visit: http://www.spencertravel.com.au

Watch this space!

Dutch radio station offers space flight as prize


by Thijs Westerbeek


Dutch commercial radio station Q-music is trying to further raise its profile, and its market share, with a remarkable promotional activity. Listeners can submit their names, and every hour three names are mentioned on the air. The first person to call back after hearing his or her name stands a chance of winning a very special prize.

The prize consists of a so-called 'suborbital' flight, where a small, space shuttle type of aircraft will be launched on the back of a bigger plane. Although the Space Shuttle Explorer will go higher than 100 kilometres for only a few minutes, it will indeed be a real space flight. According to the renowned Dutch aerospace journalist Govert Schilling, it will be an experience the winner will never forget for the rest of his or her life.

"You will reach an altitude of over 100 kilometres, which is far beyond the atmosphere. You will see the blackness of the universe and you will see the Earth as a beautiful blue planet from the outside. However, it will only be for a short time, and a few minutes later you will be landing on the runway, like a plane."

Harmful exhaust fumes
It will be an exciting trip, but it will have a harmful effect on the atmosphere, says Peter van Vliet. He's the president of iNS, a foundation that promotes sustainability; he is also the editor-in-chief of a Dutch-language news site on sustainability. He says the higher aerial strata in the atmosphere are especially vulnerable.
"Those higher aerial strata are extremely thin. The exhaust fumes emitted at that level cause much more damage than the same amount of exhaust fumes would do on lower aerial strata."

Van Vliet holds the view that space tourism is unacceptable at a time when there is so much attention on air pollution and climate change. He says it will be even more unacceptable if such commercial space flights happen more frequently in the future.
"It's a classic case of something you just can't do anymore, in this day and age. Just look at the fuel that is burned up, and the emissions an adventure like that will produce, and compare it with those five minutes of fun for six passengers. What's more, if you think of your direct contribution to the decay of the higher aerial strata, I have serious doubts about the whole thing."
Drawing board
It remains to be seen if the lucky Q-music listener really will embark on a journey into space. In fact, the spaceship only exists on the drawing board at the moment, and the launch sites in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore still have to be built as well.

The website of 'Space Adventures', the American company that is supposed to carry our the space flights, is keeping silent about when all of these plans are going to be realised. It will take years before they're able to stage a space flight, if at all. The winner of the contest will be announced on Saturday 22 September at a special event in the aviation and space travel museum Aviodome in Lelystad, the Netherlands.

Parabolic Flights

The Physical Sciences in Space Program of Space Science has the mandate to promote research in a microgravity environment. Various platforms offer such an environment, including parabolic flights, which are relatively inexpensive and very accessible.
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For $250,000, you too can slip the surly bonds of Earth to say, `I do'

Weddings atop mountains and waterfalls. Weddings while skydiving and bungee jumping. Weddings inside mines and caves.

Yawn.

It's high time for people to expand their horizons and look beyond this world for marriage inspiration.

Cindy Cashman has. The professional speaker and self-help pocket book author from Lakeway, Tex., hopes to be the first person to get married in outer space.

Surely that's the final frontier for getting hitched.

It could happen as early as 2009. Cashman, 48, has an agreement with a Oklahoma-based company called Rocketplane, which is trying to pioneer spaceflight for the general public, to be one of the first regular folks shot into space.

For her, though, the trip will be extra special. "To go someplace where very few people have gone, and see the curvature of the Earth, and be weightless, and to look into the eyes of the man I love and say, `I do,'" she says in an interview, "this ties it all together: the excitement, the adventure, the opportunity of a lifetime!"

Rocketplane XP, the airplane-like spacecraft in which she and her fiancé will exchange vows, will use its jet engines, then its rocket engine to propel its passengers almost vertically beyond the Earth's atmosphere on a parabolic trajectory.

At its 100 km apogee, they'll be in outer space, free from the shackles of gravity, gazing at Earth's bright contours below.

Actually, there won't be time for that. They'll have just three to five minutes before they fall back into Earth's grip. Quick, the vows! "Do you take this man...I do! Do you take this woman...I do!"

Cashman and her 55-year-old beau, Mitch Walling, a pilot for regional airline American Eagle, also won't be able to stand for the ceremony. For safety reasons they'll have to stay belted to their seats. But he'll probably be able to kiss the bride.

A space wedding was bound to happen. Wherever humans have brought themselves, they have also brought their most celebrated institution. The whole idea of the "extreme wedding" was born out of the idea that the more arduous the journey, the more special the bond.

So far, couples aren't clamouring to have their weddings in space. This may be partly because of the cost. Even though Rocketplane and its competitors, such as billionaire Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, are set to expand space travel beyond the rarefied astronaut, it won't be available to the masses: Each ticket will cost about $250,000 U.S.

That hasn't stopped Virgin Galactic from collecting $25 million in deposits so far. One woman has even mortgaged her house to be able to go.

Virgin has had a number of inquiries from couples who want to fly to space together. One couple, George Whitesides – head of the U.S. National Space Society and, as of last week, an advisor to the company – and his wife Loretta, say they want to have their "honeymoon" in space.

Cashman says the idea came to her as a random thought that just popped into her head while she was meditating.

It wouldn't be out of character for her. She has already tried flying upside down with an aerobatic pilot.

The problem was that, at the time, she didn't have a fiancé. Not even a boyfriend.

Fortunately, she was enrolled in a dating service and was meeting singles in cyberspace. After going through 32 guys, she met Walling.

Not long after, he popped the question – at high speed on a motorbike. She was over the moon, and told him she'd like to head that way to get hitched.

"People think we're crazy," Cashman says, "but others just expected this from me."

All systems are go, it seems. There's one problem, however. If they wed in space, where on Earth would they officially be married?

One aviation lawyer told an Austin newspaper that there is "no body of law or jurisdiction that exists in space to confer recognition on a marriage ceremony."

Toronto family lawyer Steven Bookman disagrees. He compares it to couples who marry in, say, Las Vegas, or on a beach in the Caribbean or, in the case of landed immigrants, back in their native countries. If they're legally married in those places, they're considered married here.

"It shouldn't be any different" in space, he argues.

The challenge is, where would the marriage be registered? "It would seem to be the (jurisdiction of the) person that owns the actual craft you're getting married on," Bookman says.

Cashman still hasn't decided who will perform the ceremony. There's still one empty seat in the four-person vessel should she find someone. But that may not be necessary, Bookman says.

"The captain of a ship has the authority to marry people outside of the jurisdiction of the country where the craft is registered," he says.

"I'm sure he would have to authority to marry them and it would be recognized everywhere."

http://www.thestar.com