Fly Me To The Moon

…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

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”.