Pack Your Jetpack

Nowhere have future predictions become reality as quickly as in the travel industry. Blackbook looks at the top trends changing the way we move

- K Fernandez

Fifty years ago, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke predicted that luxurious intergalactic travel would be a way of life by the 21st century. While that scenario hasn’t yet come to pass, it won’t be long before holiday hunters head beyond the confines of Earth’s furthest reaches. Just this month, two bits of news brought the cosmos “tantalisingly close”, in the words of Richard Branson. His Unity spaceship achieved supersonic speed in the same week that the first luxury space hotel was announced.

Space, of course, is the final frontier for humanity, but the rest of the travel industry isn’t exactly short on big ideas. Intrepid entrepreneurs from Elon Musk to Sergey Brin and Larry Page are pushing heavily to realise their boyhood fantasies, to cater to a market that is set to grow 50 per cent over the next decade. International arrivals will skyrocket to a total 1.8 billion by 2030, up from 1.3 billion in 2017, according to the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO). And all these people will be travelling faster and wider than ever.

The sound of silence

NASA awarded a $247.5 million contract to Lockheed Martin Skunk Works to build a quieter version of the Concorde by 2021. This new X-plane could be flying 1,513kmph from New York to Mumbai without sonic booms by 2027. “It is super exciting to be back designing and flying X-planes at this scale,” said Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics. “Our long tradition of solving the technical barriers of supersonic flight to benefit everyone continues.”