You board your vehicle, a rocket sitting on its tail on the concrete apron of the spaceport, strap yourself in…and soon you’re blasting off into space.
First stop: the Hilton Orbiter Hotel, a zero-gravity lodge in orbit around the Earth. You’ll spend a couple of days there while your rocket shuttles others back to Earth, getting your space legs and enjoying the amazing view of the blue-and-white Earth rotating below. Shaped like a spinning wheel, the hotel has artificial gravity in its outer sections, where the hotel rooms are located, but zero gravity at the center, so you can get acclimated by degrees to life in space.
Then it’s off again to the Moon and a stay at the Lunar Sheraton, built in a sealed-off lava tube. Here you’ll eat and sleep in one-sixth of Earth gravity, taking occasional space-suited exploration forays out onto the crater-pocked surface.
Sound like science fiction? Indeed it does, but some serious people are putting down hard money to make these one-time fantasies come true in the 21st Century.
One company already is taking reservations for suborbital tourist flights to start by the end of 2001. Another company is designing a 100-room orbiting hotel and hopes to have it in place by 2017. Hilton Hotels’ Jeannie Datz said last fall that the company is looking into the feasibility of a space hotel to see “if Hilton can be first into space.” And Arthur C. Clarke, author of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” expects humans to walk on Mars by 2021 and predicts that, even earlier, Britain’s Prince Harry will go into space and “may even stop at the Hilton Orbiter Hotel.”
Travel and tourism promise to change dramatically in the next century, and predictions are coming thick and fast with the advent of the new millennium. Just in December, Judson Green, chairman of Walt Disney World Attractions, painted a rosy picture for 21st Century travel. “The decline in global conflicts…will bring an explosion in travel around the world,” he told a panel brought together by concierge.com, the Web site of Conde Nast Traveler magazine. “Rather than leading to the homogenization of cultures, countries competing for tourism will celebrate their diversity to differentiate themselves.”
On the same panel, author Jan Morris foresaw fewer “tourists” and more “travelers” traveling with a sense of purpose. “Mass tourism is beginning to fade, which I can only see as a good thing.”
As for Arthur C. Clarke, he not only foresees Prince Harry going into space, but predicts that in 2057 — 100 years after the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was sent into orbit — humans will stage celebrations on Earth, the Moon, Mars, Europa and Ganymede (Jupiter’s moons), and Titan (Saturn’s moon). He made the predictions in an Oxford Press anthology titled “Predictions.”
Clarke’s forecasts may sound like flights of fancy, but many Earth-bound folks believe space travel for ordinary people is not far off. “The only thing standing in the way…is the expense,” former astronaut Buzz Aldrin said recently. “We do have the technological ability.”
Already, a company called Space Adventures, based in Seattle, is taking reservations for suborbital flights to begin within five years. The flights would reach an altitude of 70 miles and last between 30 and 90 minutes, according to Chris Faranetti, suborbital program manager of Space Adventures. The company presently operates zero-gravity flights and markets rides in fighter planes for adventuresome travelers.
Its space-going passengers would pay $98,000 for a six-day package that includes medical checkups, training, briefings by astronauts and safety reviews as well as the actual flight. Already, 139 persons have put down $6,000 to sign up, Faranetti said.
“We’re very confident we can produce this in five years,” said Faranetti. “We are working with a half-dozen countries developing the technology. For example, one company is actually flight testing the first stage of the vehicle, and another is flight testing the recovery component.”
Meanwhile, another company, the international architectural firm of Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo, based in Honolulu, has drawn up plans for a 100-room hotel that it hopes to have orbiting in space by 2017. Designer of the futuristic Atlantis Hotel in Nassau and many other major resorts, the company would like to make use of the Space Shuttle’s huge external fuel tanks, which now are dropped into the sea when their fuel is expended.
“They cost $45 million each to build, so it makes economic sense to use them,” said Howard Wolff, a vice president of the company.
What Wolff’s company proposes is to have the Shuttle put the tanks into low orbit rather than jettison them. The orange-colored tanks, which are 27 feet in diameter and 160 feet long, would then be linked together into a ring resembling a bicycle wheel to form the basic structure of the hotel.
“This [wheel] would rotate to create one-quarter gravity, not too fast, but enough to utilize plumbing. The guest rooms would be in this outer ring,” Wolff said. In the hub of the wheel, reached through its spokes, passengers would experience a weightless environment and look out on the stars from observation decks.
NASA has not specifically addressed the reuse of Shuttle fuel tanks, but spokesman Brian Welch said last fall, “We are open to proposals. I don’t think anybody believes it’s going to happen tomorrow, but…there are new spacecraft being built that could lead to widespread traffic back and forth into space.”
Bob Haltermann, an official with the Space Transportation Association, agrees with the projected scenario of commercial suborbital flight within five years. He also sees the possibility of orbital flights in 5 to 10 years, with one caveat: “The cost of transport has to be reduced drastically, to lower the cost of going into orbit.”
One way to reduce costs is to develop reusable spacecraft. Development of such vehicles has intensified since the establishment of the $10 million Xprize, which will be awarded to the first company to send a minimum of three people into space a distance of 100 kilometers and return them safely to earth twice within two weeks.
Fifteen American companies have registered so far for the prize. A similar prize spurred Charles Lindbergh to make his historic transatlantic flight in 1927.
After suborbital and orbital flights, travelers would begin reaching further out into space, said Haltermann. “Maybe the lunar surface in 30 years. Mars? That’s pretty far out,” he said.
While some visionaries are working toward tourism in space, others see a fascinating future for travel and tourism under the sea.
Ian Koblink, owner of the world’s only undersea hotel, the Jules Lodge in the Florida Keys, says plans are “quite far along” to construct a 3,000-acre theme park in Panama that would include a 300-acre underwater hotel. It would be built on a site at the west end of the Panama Canal.
“The bay there has tides of 18 feet, so we have to build a coffer dam and an artificial lagoon,” said Koblink, who says the proposal has the working name of Aqua 2000.
In the lagoon, he said, would be a 100-room underwater hotel complex whose sectors would be connected by acrylic tunnels. Another facility would house an underwater restaurant, a casino and entertainment venue. Koblink said the project is awaiting bank approval of financing.
Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo, which is working on the orbiting hotel, also is designing an underwater hotel, this one with 80 rooms and an observatory. “The guest rooms would be below water, along with a marine lab,” said Wolff. “Above water would be sun decks, the restaurants, possibly a wedding chapel. Guests would get the feeling of being on a cruise ship without getting seasick.” Wolff said the company has a prospective client, and that possible sites for the hotel are Hawaii, the Caribbean and Mexico.
Those are some of the more exotic predictions of things to come in the 21st Century. Back on solid Earth and looking nearer into the future, most transportation experts see little change coming in the way we move around the planet.
“We’ll be flying the same way as now for the next 20 or 30 years. I don’t see a difference,” said Mary Jean Olsen of the Boeing Co., the world’s biggest manufacturer of airliners. She does expect changes inside the planes, including increased safety features — among them ground proximity sensors with wider range and additional data and voice recorders as well as more sophisticated in-flight entertainment, such as personal televisions.
“We might see planes [that fly] a bit faster, but we don’t believe there is a market for bigger planes.”
On that point, Airbus Industrie, the European airplane manufacturer, disagrees. It is pushing development of a 650-passenger “super jumbo” aircraft. In December, Airbus directors judged the $12 billion project as “economically viable” and said it would survey airlines to ascertain demand for the A3XX. If approved, work would begin in 2000, with the first commercial flight by 2005. Boeing has abandoned its own plans for a super jumbo and instead is studying the stretching of its 747 to more than 500 seats.
While some companies are looking to sleeker and faster aircraft, one project is looking at the return to the airship.
At the request of Conde Nast magazine, the Wimberly firm has developed a concept for a vessel with twice the carrying power of the early dirigibles. From it would hang a pod containing a hotel.
“It would be an environmentally safe way [to travel],” said Wolff. “The ship would land gently without disturbing the environment. [The concept] kind of goes hand in hand with the notion that hotels don’t have to be tied to one place. We would be cruising the skies.”
Meanwhile, the ocean-bound cruise industry will continue to boom, predicted Bob Dickinson, president of Carnival Cruise Lines, but don’t expect any radical changes as the lines work to get more people on cruise ships.
Though his line, the biggest in the world, is building ships so large — more than 100,000 gross tons — that they cannot pass through the Panama Canal, Dickinson sees a strong future for ships in the 75,000- to 85,000-ton range. “They have all the bells and whistles of the bigger ships,” he said, “and they’re more versatile.”
The main mode of personal transport will remain the automobile, but one company, Moiller International of California, has been working for years to develop its Skycar, a vehicle that would take off and land vertically. With a top speed of 350 miles per hour, the vehicle could seat four people, get about 20 miles to a gallon of fuel and cost just $60,000 when mass-produced.
Destinations will fan out as modes of transportation improve.
Antoine Toffa, president of thetrip.com, an on-line travel company, believes 21st Century travelers will go to places little visited today — to Sierra Leone and Togo, for instance. A report from the World Tourism Organization, which has 138 country members, said China will replace France as the world’s top tourist destination by 2020, hosting 130 million visitors annually then, compared to 24 million now.
France, with 106.1 million visitors, will rank second, the WTO said, and the United States third with 102.4 million.
However, these traveling hordes may dwindle and all those wonderful improvements in transportation and travel styles may come to naught if another vision of the future comes to pass.
“One of the grandest visions of travel in the 21st Century is that which gives you the possibility of telepresence: the concept of being able to beam yourself to any point on the planet,” said Toffa. “Maybe it will take 20, maybe it will take 30 years, but clearly you’ll be able to project your image, your hologram basically, from point A to point B without actually leaving point A.”
In other words, you would travel without actually going anywhere. What’s the fun in that?
Next month, on Feb. 13, in conjunction with a special Destination: Adventure feature, we’ll have more on the future of travel — this time down-to-Earth adventure travel.
