Things you might have guessed you wouldn't live to see, but you did!

Special Dispatch #4 Thanksgiving, 2008

We'll keep churning out the good news items all Thanksgiving weekend long.

Item 4
Passenger space travel 'by middle of next decade'

Passengers will be able to fly through space from London to New York in 45 minutes by the middle of the next decade, experts believe.

Sydney could be only two and a half hours away and it could take less time to get to Tokyo than it does to take a train from London to Manchester.

Walter Peeters, dean of the International Space University in Strasbourg, said that what has been regarded as the stuff of science fiction is close to becoming reality.

He is among a number of scientists who are convinced that "space tourism" and "sub-orbital point to point travel" (SPTP) are on the point of becoming a flourishing industries.

The former is aimed at the well-heeled who are ready to dig deep in their pockets for the experience of space travel for its own sake which on Virgin Galactic is $200,000 or around £125,000.

But this is just a staging post for the ultimate goal, traveling through space to get from one side of the globe to the other in a couple of hours.

The advocates of SPTP see it as the 21st century equivalent of taking a trip on Concorde – and appealing to the same sort of clientele.

The Good News

Space tourism and sub-orbital point-to-point travel (SPTP) have been the stuff of "the future" my entire life. Some of us were disappointed when SPTP didn't show up in the latter decades of the previous century -- there was a time when we definitely seemed to be heading in that direction -- but nobody ever really expected space tourism. That is to say, there weren't any timetables associated with it. It was wacky, far-out stuff: something that would come along only after the serious applications of rocket technology were given the chance to prove themselves.

How interesting that it now seems that space tourism might be the business model that enables the development of SPTP. Didn't see that one coming, now did we?

The Downside

Such travel will not come cheap. One estimate suggests a ticket for a round trip taking in London, Tokyo and New York would cost more than £43,000.

Yeeouch! That's like, more than 100,000 US dollars for one trip.

On the other hand -- don't worry. Those are 2050 pounds / dollars we're talking about. Plus, the price is bound to go down from there.

Live to see it!