AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter November 1995 Where No Tourist Has Gone Before: Space -- The Final Front Tour by Brenda Forman By the time he was fifty, my father had gone everywhere. He,d explored innermost Tibet, covered the outbreak of every major war in either hemisphere since the early 1930s, filmed the blitz of Warsaw and the fall of Shanghai (twice: once to the Japanese and 12 years later to the Chinese Communists), escaped Dien Bein Phu one single jump ahead of the Viet Minh in 1954, photographed emerald strikes in Central America and revolutions in the Belgian Congo. So when he finally decided that dodging other people,s bullets might be getting a little strenuous for a man his age, he did the only logical thing: he opened a travel agency. His clientele was highly specialized: Harrison Forman World Travel was for the person who had been everywhere, had tired of Paris, London and Rome, and was looking for somewhere really unusual -- preferably somewhere none of his/her friends had ever been. My father had the answer: how about the Gobi Desert? or maybe the jungles of northern Thailand? or Timbuktu? His clients demanded comfort, of course -- not always an easy thing to provide in such exotic locales. But they happily paid very hefty premiums for those comforts -- and, presumably, for the opportunity to ace out their neighbors back home with the resulting color slides. All that was thirty years ago. Since then, the worldwide travel business has exploded to embrace even the locales that Dad,s clients once thought so gratifyingly outre but which now tend to have Swiss- managed, Japanese-financed luxury hotels complete with CNN, sauna and in-room fax, situated at convenient intervals for the weary traveler. To go where no tourist has gone before, the determinedly adventurous traveler must now look a lot farther afield. And if Harrison Forman World Travel still existed today, I know precisely where its clientele would want to go: space. Now, the idea of space tourism has been around for quite a few years and on the few occasions when anybody bothered to ask, they found a substantial level of pent-up demand. A decade ago, for example, Society Expeditions in Seattle offered reservations for an orbital tour of the Earth on vehicle they proposed to design and build. Five thousand dollars paid into escrow guaranteed you a reserved seat when the vehicle was ready. Almost immediately, they got 300 reservations. Since then, though, the space-is-dignified-and-serious crowd that has dominated our space efforts for far too long has pooh-poohed the space tourism idea. Except, that is, for the Japanese. Typically, they have been less concerned with the dignity of space than with its money-making potential. Back in 1993, they put together a group of professional and industry representatives to conduct a major market survey. After querying more than 3000 respondents from all kinds of backgrounds, they finally concluded that the market for space tourism is potentially $10- 20 billion a year. Not shabby. As Sen. Everett Dirksen would have remarked, A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you,re talking about real money. And now, at long last, the idea is getting a serious hearing in the U.S. In September, NASA and the Space Transportation Association signed an agreement to do a thorough study of the space tourism market. The study is to be a broad, inclusive assessment of everything that might bear on the size and viability of a space travel industry: not just launch vehicles, operations costs and life-support technology, but market size, profit potential, and the mind-bending list of requirements for keeping guests fed, lodged, entertained, safe and comfortable. In addition to the requisite number of aerospace engineers, the study group will include several representatives from the travel and tourism industry. If they smell profits in the study results, we may truly have a brand new industry on our hands. Market pull always helps in such matters, of course, and you can do your part there. The November issue of Ad Astra, the National Space Society,s magazine, will contain a questionnaire designed to get a first-cut take on who might want to buy a trip to orbit, how much they might be willing to pay for it, and who else they think might be interested. Get your copy and send in your response. What the hell, send two.