Abstract
When space tourism becomes open to the general public, not just the wealthy, the initial trips will be suborbital, up and back with a brief period of ug and an exhilarating view of the curvature of the Earth. The big change in the new world of space tourism is that it will be developed by private commercial companies, not governments. Burt Rutan, who built and flew the first around the world non-stop airplane, and his Scaled Composites Company showed that it can be done. In 2004, they flew SpaceshipOne to space and repeated the feat in less than 2 weeks to win the X Prize (Figure 6.1).
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Phillips, R.W. (2012). Tomorrow’s Tourist Adventures. In: Grappling with Gravity. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6899-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6899-9_6
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