One short flight for man, or the start of a long voyage for rich men.
That's one way of looking at Monday's historic jaunt of the revolutionary spacecraft SpaceShipOne, which crossed the brink of space for the second time in six days. The achievement enabled the spacecraft's team to claim the US$10 million Ansari X prize and prove its viability as the prototype for the first commercial space liner.
"This is a milestone for humanity," said John Spencer, president of the Space Tourism Society in Los Angeles. He told Space.com that the flight represented "the kickoff of the space tourist industry."
But don't get your flight suit out of the closet just yet, unless you have a large appetite for risk and adventure and an even larger bank account.
Although the flight was completed without glitches, the previous mission five days earlier was marked by a series of almost 30 rolls. That's enough to induce motion sickness among even those with stomachs of steel. Even the standard re-entry procedure subjected the pilot's body to five time the force of gravity.
But for those hardy individuals perpetually looking to cross the next frontier, these risks are but minor inconveniences on the way to realizing the lifelong dream of flying through space and experiencing the surreal sensation of life unbounded by the pull of earth's gravity.
Adventurer and entrepreneur Richard Branson has already booked his place on a suborbital space flight, paying up to US$15 million to license the SpaceShipOne technology as the basis for his own fleet of space-liners, which will fly under the banner of his newly formed company Virgin Galactic. The expected price of a ticket will be some US$175,000 per trip, which, if it is similar to Monday's flight, would last about 90 minutes.
Branson might have some cheaper competition, however.
Just minutes after SpaceShipOne touched down, a company called Space Adventures was busy calling prospective clients and journalists, offering them the chance of a ride in the record-breaking craft for just US$102,000, including four days of training.
There are also numerous other teams work to build reusable, commercially viable space craft capable of carrying passengers to the edge of space. They vowed, after the flight, to keep developing their vehicles, even though SpaceShipOne looked to have claimed the US$10 million prize.
At least 24 teams were working on spaceships to win the prize. Many see the opening of the space frontier as lucrative enough to justify their investments, even without the incentive of the X Prize.
"I think you'll see the first Canadian, the first Russian, the first British, the first Romanian -- all the X Prize teams outside the US will continue their work to become the first of their nation to carry out a first private flight into space," said X Prize founder Peter Diamandis.
Brian Feeney, who leads a rival X Prize effort called the da Vinci Group, said that he was determined to continue.
"We're moving our program as fast as we can," Feeney said. "We'll announce a launch date in a short period of time."
Ultimately, however, the true value of the success may not lie in ferrying space fans for a brief jaunt into the blackness but in developing revolutionary new techniques that can carry the scientific exploration of space to a new level.
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