22 When Can I Take a Vacation in Space?

Everyone who has flown in space has had fun up there. Floating around weightless like Peter Pan, playing with food, performing crazy stunts never possible on Earth. Who wouldn’t want to join in on the fun?

If you want to fly in space today, there are three ways to get there. You can climb aboard an American rocket. You can ride a Russian Soyuz rocket. Or you can take a flight on the Chinese Shenzhou rocket. These are the only ways to reach space at the moment, and to fly in any of them you have to train for years.

But all that is about to change. Soon, you’ll be able to take a spaceflight just for the fun of it, and you won’t have to be an astronaut to do it.

Companies around the world are building a new generation of spaceships—small, cheap rockets designed to take tourists on the vacation of a lifetime. Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo is a combination of a rocket and an airplane that seats six passengers and two pilots. It’s carried high in the air by a large airplane called WhiteKnightTwo. The spaceship is released from the plane, fires its rocket engines, and takes the passengers on a thrilling high-speed ride almost straight up above the Earth’s atmosphere to the edge of space. When the rocket engine shuts down, the passengers unbuckle their seat belts and float around weightless for a few minutes, enjoying the view of the Earth and the blackness of space.

After the space plane reaches its maximum height, it begins to fall back to Earth. Everyone returns to their seats and hangs on for an exciting dive back down into the atmosphere before they glide back to the same runway the space plane took off from.

Another spaceship, called New Shepard, uses a capsule with very large windows that sits on top of a rocket. The ship blasts off straight up from the ground and goes just above the atmosphere, where the capsule separates and the people inside experience a few minutes of weightlessness. Then both the capsule and rocket come straight back down separately, with the rocket booster using its engines to land and the capsule floating down by parachutes.

Both of these spaceships are designed to take tourists into space and are operated by private companies. That means anyone can buy a ticket to space.

If you want to spend much more time up in space, you can even buy a ticket up to the International Space Station. You would travel to Moscow, to train with the Russian space agency, then fly to space on a Soyuz rocket alongside professional cosmonauts. After a week on the space station, you would come back with another crew who had been living in space and are on their way home. Several space tourists have already made the trip. One thing they had in common: they were all very rich. That’s because a ticket to the International Space Station costs about $50 million! Tickets for the shorter tourist flights will be much cheaper: only $250,000.

The cost of flying in space might seem expensive right now, but when airlines first started many years ago, only rich people could afford to fly. After a while, as more people took to the air, the price of a plane ticket came down. Today, many people can afford to fly on an airplane. Maybe the same thing will happen with spaceflight. We’ll let the rich people get it started, then the rest of us can fly later.

In the future, it will probably be possible to spend a week at an actual hotel in space. It won’t be very big, but it will be made just for tourists, so you’ll have your own room and a window to look down on the Earth. Eventually, more modules will be added, which means there will be more room and more things to do up there.

But these small space hotels are just the beginning. Imagine really large structures shaped like giant Ferris wheels that slowly turn. In your room along the rim, there would be artificial gravity created by the spin, so you’ll be able to walk around like you do on Earth, except that you’ll be in space.

While you’re there, if you want to experience weightlessness, just go to the center of the wheel, where you would weigh nothing at all. That would be the best place to put the space swimming pool. Can you imagine what the pool would be like in a space hotel? Because of the weightlessness, the water in a regular pool would float all over the room! But if the pool were in the shape of a big drum that slowly spins, the water would stick to the inside of the walls. Think of the fun you could have swimming all the way around the walls and ceiling and doing slow-motion dives!

Vacations in space are just in their infancy. For now, there’s no space hotel or weightless swimming pools, and there are no trips to the moon… but even that is coming soon. The one giant leap into space you may be able to take in the future—and it is really out of this world—is, in fact, a moon trip. You won’t land or get to walk on the moon, but you’ll get to go there, fly around it, and return home again. The trip would take about a week. No tourist has made the trip yet, and that could be because of the cost. A ticket to the moon costs only… one hundred million dollars!

While we wait for commercial spaceships to be built to take us to the moon and beyond, there’s a way you can feel like you’re flying in space and experience the weightlessness astronauts do by flying in a very special airplane made by a company called Zero G. It uses a big airplane affectionately known as the “Vomit Comet.” It’s called that because some people get sick riding in it. I was fortunate enough to fly in this plane, and happily, I did not get sick!

The airplane is an airliner with most of the seats removed and all the windows covered up. You sit in seats that are at the back of the plane, and as it takes off, you can’t tell what the plane is doing because you can’t see outside. You’re inside a big hollow tube. All you can hear are the jet engines.

When the plane reaches a special zone over the ocean, everyone gets out of their seats and lies on their backs on the padded floor. The roar of the engines gets louder as the pilots point the plane upward at a steep angle. Then the plane is put through a special arc called a ballistic arc, which is the same type of curve that a baseball, football, snowball—anything that is thrown through the air—follows. And remember: when anything is falling through the air, it’s weightless until it hits the ground.

As the plane comes over the top of the curve, everyone inside rises off the floor and floats weightless inside. It’s as though someone simply turned gravity off and your body no longer stays down. Everyone in the plane I was on immediately began to laugh hysterically as we bumped into one another and slowly bounced off the walls. I had an urge to wave my arms and kick my feet as though swimming through water, but that doesn’t work in the air. In fact, the more you wave and kick, the more you tumble out of control, with a good chance of kicking someone else in the head.

It takes very little to set your body in motion. Just the slightest touch on a wall or the floor sends you floating in the opposite direction, and once you start moving through the air, it’s really hard to stop yourself until you hit something. Soon, you learn to slow down and take your time, which is why astronauts seem to move in slow motion. They have to be gentle or they will spin out of control.

After thirty seconds of floating, the airplane ends up pointing steeply down toward the ground. Instructors in the plane with you yell out, “Feet down!” That means point your feet toward the floor. As the pilots pull the airplane out of the dive, you float gently back down to the floor, and as it continues through the bottom of the curve, heading back up for the next maneuver, gravity comes back, getting stronger and stronger until you weigh twice your normal weight from the force of the plane climbing. That’s what it would feel like to be on a planet much bigger than the Earth, where the gravity is stronger.

The pilots also gave us the feeling of walking on a planet smaller than Earth, too. One g is the gravity of Earth, and right now, you’re feeling one g as you sit in your chair. But Mars is smaller than the Earth, so the gravity is less there.

On one of the ballistic hops, the pilots brought our weight down to one-third of a g, which is the gravity of Mars. As the airplane simulated Mars, I found my walking style changed. Each step lifted me off the floor just a bit, so I could bounce along on my toes. I tried to imagine people on Mars all walking with a bounce in their step!

Next, the pilots lowered our weight even further to one-sixth of a g, which is the gravity of the moon. You’ve probably seen movies of the Apollo astronauts bouncing around in the low gravity of the moon, but they were wearing bulky space suits. In ordinary clothing, you feel really light in moon gravity. When I jumped, I floated back down slowly, like a leaf falling from a tree. That was a surprise. In a moon habitat, if you wanted to go up to the second floor, you wouldn’t need to use stairs. You could easily jump up and float to the upper floor without hurting yourself.

In moon gravity, I was able to do a standing backflip in slow motion. When I tried to flip forward, I pushed off too hard. My back hit the ceiling of the plane and I seemed to stick up there for a second. Then I started to slowly fall back down headfirst. Luckily, I had time to put my arms out, touch the floor while upside down, and push myself slowly back onto my feet. It was amazing. What did I learn? Gymnastics on the moon will be a breeze!

It’s quite a ride, changing from super heavy to no weight at all and back again fifteen times in a row. Not bad for a single plane trip! During each period of weightlessness, I got better at controlling my body, until I was able to do multiple tumbles end over end while floating in the middle of the space. It was a magical experience, floating freely like Peter Pan and being able to fly in any direction like Superman. No wonder astronauts seem to be having so much fun in space!