Space, the final frontier for the tourist adventurer

Forget canoeing over waterfalls in New Zealand, scuba diving among sharks in Fiji, or white-water rafting in Africa. The new adventure tourism is going to be a flight into space and a stay at a space hotel.

If you're thinking, "not in my lifetime", then you're wrong, says Dr Thomas Beer, a lawyer with the European Space Agency (ESA) in Paris, whose job is thinking through the issues and negotiating the contracts to help make space travel a reality.

Space tourism is already here, he notes - the problem is, you have to have a spare $20 million (€20.18 million) lying around to pay for a trip to the International Space Station (ISS), an opportunity seized by two business tycoons, American Mr Dennis Tito and South African Mr Mark Shuttleworth.

But the ESA as well as North American Space Agency (NASA) have plans to get you out into the final frontier, starting around 2020.

"People want to go somewhere they have never seen before," Dr Beer says, with a certain degree of understatement. He points out that travel agencies have already been formed to handle enquiries, a German/Russian space travel consortium called Astrium has "space hopper" vehicles well into the planning stage, and the Hilton hotel group has apparently even been considering how a space hotel might be constructed.

"The whole business of space travel is coming from the planning stage to the implementation stage," says Dr Beer. "It will be a kind of adventure tourism."

It could also be a major boost for international space agencies, which have struggled to find funding in a post-Cold War climate where big manned flight missions have been usurped by cheaper satellite and research vehicle launches.

Even NASA, which expressed firm reservations about having a non-professional astronaut up in the space station for Mr Tito's flight, has changed its tune.

When boy band member Mr Lance Bass from 'N'Sync nearly became the third space tourist, NASA clearly capitalised on the publicity and youth appeal a celebrity could bring to its beleaguered space program. Mr Bass failed to raise the full amount of funding needed, but brought NASA more publicity than a herd of roving Mars Explorers.

The International Space Station and the space tourist "taxi flights" that carry passengers like Mr Shuttleworth to it, have served as a "pathfinder" for space tourism, according to Dr Werner Inden, director of New Ventures for Bremen, Germany-based Astrium.

Now that people have seen tourists travelling to the International Space Station, interest in flights will help spur the growth of a private space travel industry and the building of space hotels, which ultimately will help create self-funding international space programmes.

He thinks flights to a space hotel complex will begin by 2026, with under 100 manned flights per year, jumping to 1,000 flights a decade later, and 6,000 annually by 2050.

Astrium has plans for a "space coaster", a vehicle capable of carrying up to 12 passengers. The coaster looks like a space shuttle with a glass dome piggybacking on the ship, in which the paying passengers would sit and gain a full view of space, the moon, earth and stars.

Dr Beer says that these vehicles would be preceded by six-passenger space "hoppers" that could bring people into suborbital flight - not high enough to be into outer space, where the space station orbits, but high enough to see the blackness of space and for passengers to experience weightlessness.

The advantage of staying within this area of "inner space" - 35 kilometres high, compared to commercial jets that travel at around seven km altitude, and outer space at 90-100km - is that airspace remains under national air traffic control, just like commercial jet flights.

"But the hopper will just be a gap-filler until we're ready to launch the new generation of spacecraft," he says.

For a viable space travel industry, ticket prices would need to drop from today's $20 million to about $50,000, says Dr Inden.

Such a price may sound high, but passengers on ultra-luxury cruises already come close to this amount, and Dr Beer notes that such a sum is the cost of a luxury car - not an unobtainable sum for many people.

Even now, some 1000 people per year are willing to pay $10,000 for flights in Russian supersonic high-altitude jets, offered by Mig, the Russian partner in Astrium.

Dr Inden believes true space travel will be initiated with the space coaster enabling people to "touch space" in about 2020.

This will be followed by 'Astros', a "post-hopper space liner vehicle" that can carry 100 people.

Astrium has also developed a plan for a free-floating space hotel that would rotate gently to create its own gravitational force, reminiscent of the spinning space hotels of Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: a Space Odyssey.

The American roadmap for space tourism, drawn up by NASA, is similar. Today, the space shuttle can move astronauts to an orbital platform like the International Space Station for scientific study, and satellite repair, retrieval and deployment.

By 2010, shuttles will be replaced by space transport vehicles that can carry passengers, and will cost 10 times less and be 100 times safer.

By 2025, third generation vehicles will be 100 times cheaper and 10,000 times safer than today's shuttles; they will deliver passengers to multiple destinations and open new space travel markets.

By 2040, fourth generation vehicles will be 1000 times cheaper, and 20,000 times safer, and will be used for routine passenger travel.

However, such plans raise all sorts of legal and liability and insurance problems - one of NASA's principle worries when Mr Tito was fired into orbit.

Such concerns are Dr Beer's speciality - a reminder that lawyers will always be with us, even when one is more than 35 kilometres distant from the planet's surface.

On the International Space Station, lawyers have already considered such issues as "how can we be sure that the astro-tourist behaves in a way that is acceptable and responsible and so that the station's activities aren't hampered," says Dr Beer.

Now, they are mulling over the kinds of liability insurance the coasters and hoppers and space hotels will need, and the kinds of waiver contracts future space tourists will have to sign.

But the legalities are a sideshow - talk to anyone involved in this literally stellar industry, and a warm glow enters their voices.

"Space tourism is a natural progression, because mankind is curious," says Dr Beer.

"It's a really wonderful development. Mankind needs this, and we owe it to mankind."