The final frontier

The final frontier

Space, the final frontier: vast, inhospitable and yours at a reasonable price. At least it soon will be, according to space tourism pioneers who met in London last week to discuss how to capitalise on this new pursuit of the insanely wealthy.

There's money up high. Richard Branson thinks so. His Virgin Galactic enterprise is in a race with the Dream Chaser fleet of the US Benson Space Company to be the first to offer commercial flights into the big beyond. Passengers could be able to start boarding in 2009 as long as they can stump up $200,000 a pop.

But could space tourism also bring a much-needed cash windfall for space science? This would certainly cheer up the UK's space science community, which has been battling with the Treasury over the past few decades to justify funding increases for planetary exploration over, say, finding a cure for cancer or a new clean source of energy.

Some certainly think it will. "As space tourism gets going, it will provide economies of scale. This will get prices down, so although it will not fund space science per se, it will make it cheaper to reach orbit," says David Ashford, managing director of Bristol Spaceplanes Ltd. In just a couple of decades, he says, 1 million people a year could be looking down at Earth from the magical 100 km altitude where space begins.

However, others don't want companies involved. Colin Pillinger, who spearheaded the UK's Beagle 2 mission to Mars, says that although Beagle did offer businesses the chance to advertise, it was only because there was no other funding available.

But even if space tourism will benefit science done in low Earth orbit, such as launching satellites, it is unlikely to help scientists reach further out into the solar system, says Kevin Fong, a leading UK expert on space medicine at University College London. "It is extremely unlikely that a successful, profitable space tourism operator would find a workable business plan for the exploration of the Moon or Mars," he said.

But while space tourism is unlikely to pay directly into the UK's coffers for basic space research, if it does take off organisations such as the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council should not let the Treasury forget who nurtured the technology and who trained the scientists and engineers to make it happen. Space, the profitable frontier? Well, it has a ring to it.

Linda Nordling is editor of Research Africa