Will Not Miss Much If You Cannot Go To Mars

The search for different experiences, different adventures, different lifestyles has paved the way for this concept called the ‘new age tourism’. The salient characteristics of this form of tourism are a preoccupation with the self, in which learning and self development become leisure activity amid ecological sensibility.

- Tushar K. Mahanti

 

Place: Transit Camp on the Ninth Sky. Year: 2050

Men at the transit camp on the Ninth Sky are agitated; the Mangalyaan that is to take them back to the Earth is late. It would come from Sriharikota with a fresh group of travellers to Mars and take those back to Earth who have come back from Mars and are waiting at the transit camp. Another vehicle will take the new arrivals to Mars. Travellers from across the world are waiting at Sriharikota for their turn to fly to Mars.

Well, you may dismiss it all as science fiction - in the way our fathers viewed stories of man going to the moon or a satellite fired from Chandipur orbiting Mars. Even by that standard, tourists winging away to Mars may look a little too much to gulp. But science has a way of making science fiction real.