Tatler's Guide to Going to Outer Space

What’s the most remote place we’re fantasising about visiting once we can travel again? It’s certainly not on Earth

- Coco Marett

Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 cult sci-fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, predicted that by the start of this millennium there would have already been Pan Am-operated shuttles in space staffed by hostesses wearing “grip” shoes in order to saunter down the zero-gravity aisles, as well as galactic hotels and technology to facilitate a mission to Jupiter.

Well, we’re not quite there yet. But the world’s billioniest billionaires have taken the prospect to heart and into their own hands, founding private companies dedicated to researching space travel and rocket-building in the admirable quest to make commercial spaceflight a more realistic thing of the near future.

Just last month, Nasa sent two American astronauts—Robert L Behnken and Douglas G Hurley—on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) from the Kennedy Space Center. What made this mission particularly groundbreaking is the fact that, for the first time, astronauts travelled to orbit on a privately owned spacecraft. In this case, it was the Crew Dragon capsule built by Tesla founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX. This marked an important milestone in the goal to broaden access to space to more civilians while also lowering costs, and one that ultimately, hopefully puts space travel within reach for the rest of us.