Fly Me To The Moon
Business Traveller Middle East|February 2018

…and beyond. Spaceflight companies are already taking bookings for trips into Earth’s orbit and even around the Moon. Suddenly, a two-week holiday in the Caribbean looks very dull indeed

Dominic Bliss
Fly Me To The Moon

Later this year, if all goes to plan, two very wealthy amateur astronauts will liftoff in a rocket from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A – the same launch pad used by the Apollo missions back in the 1970s – before looping around the Moon and returning to Earth. Presumably they’ve both remembered to reserve a window seat.

This very ambitious mission is being staged by a Californian spaceflight company called SpaceX. Founded by Elon Musk – he of Tesla and PayPal fame – SpaceX won’t yet reveal very much about the mission, not even the two astronauts’ names; only that they will be launching on a 70-metre-high Falcon Heavy rocket, and then circumnavigating the Moon in a much smaller autonomous Dragon 2 spacecraft.

“This would be a long loop around the Moon,” Musk revealed. “It would skim its surface, go quite a bit further into deep space and then loop back to Earth. So I’m guessing, distance-wise, maybe 300,000 or 400,000 miles.” The flight is expected to last a week; the price, undisclosed.

Much shorter and less ambitious are the spaceflights currently planned by British entrepreneur Richard Branson’s spaceflight company Virgin Galactic. For a $250,000 (return) ticket, ordinary punters will get a trip aboard SpaceShipTwo, a reusable, rocket-powered winged spacecraft with capacity for two pilots and six passengers. The amateur astronauts will fly into space, 60-plus miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, where they will “experience a thrilling, dynamic rocket ride; true unencumbered weightlessness; and the best possible view of Earth and the blackness of space”.

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