You know as the future draws nearer (or does it ever really?) I see more sci-fi stuff becoming real. Sometime it makes me wonder, do science fiction movies actually influence what our scientist research on or do the movie directors have an inside scoop on what scientist dream about at night and then put them into movies, I don't know but I tend to lean towards the previous.
Richard Branson (Virgin group founder), has recently added a new company under his belt. This one called Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic offers normal people like me and you (Well wealthy normal people) tourist trips to space as soon as the year 2009. I found this mind shattering, so people now can go to space and actually look at the earth from another point of view for a hefty $200,000 ticket. With no surprise there is already a line of people that have payed for this and our on the line waiting for 2009 to launch this new service.
So what this actually means is that when your done traveling the world. Visiting Safari's, looking at the pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China and backpacking around Europe you can now round up your world expedition by viewing the world from the outside. As you know no good thing comes without a price. Before you go on one of these trips you have to have months of training and loads of health tests are done on you to ensure you are physically fit for such a trip, these can be time consuming and arduous.
Like any other business Virgin Galactic has competitors. Space Adventures, Rocketplane and the Benson space company, but Virgin Galactic is one of the more popular/ most commercialized of these genre of companies and one of the cheapest.
Its a matter of time and then we are going to have hotels in space to accommodate these High Fliers, in fact Hilton is one of the major investors in a private space hotel project. We are looking at probably a ten year wait here and with an investment of about 10 billion dollars needed to get this project out of the drawing boards and into space. What I find amazing about this is the how quickly fiction is turning into a reality.
What happens when we run out of ideas for fictional stories? well lets worry about that later and savor the technology of the present. Who is up for springbreak in space 2010?
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