Where is the Pan Am Space Clipper When You Need It?

In Stanley Kubrick's groundbreaking 2001: A Space Odyssey, you took the Pan Am Space Clipper into orbit and then on to the space station. There you could stay at the Howard Johnson's. This is how it was supposed to be and we should have been there six years ago.

As visualized by master special effects guru Douglas Trumbell, the world of tomorrow (six years ago) showed space travel to be a fairly routine thing done in relative comfort. You would zip up to the space station through a major airline, spend the night in a room provided by a major hotel chain and them press on to one of the bases established on the lunar surface.

Well, we aren't there yet, but we are slowly making baby steps in that direction. First there is Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's civilian spaceline that will launch from the Mojave Desert of California and later on from Spaceport America out in the New Mexico desert. Not the defunct Pan Am, but Virgin is a viable trans-Atlantic airline and now a viable US airline as well and will soon be the first sub-orbital spaceline in the world. $200,000 gets you a two and a half hour flight starting in 2009 or 2010 depending on the completion of the SpaceShipTwo fleet.

Now comes Galactic Suite, the world's first space hotel. Galactic Suite expects to open for business in 2012 and would cost $4 million for a three-day stay at the space hotel. The cost also includes a three-week stay at a "James Bond-style space camp on a tropical island."

These folks are supposedly spending $3 billion on the hotel and shuttle. If true, this is a mammoth private investment in space; much larger than anything before. Given that they do not have what appears to be a final tested design for their rocket/shuttle, 2012 seems a bit soon for these folks to be flying, but you never know. Huge sums of money have been known to move mountains in the past.

They estimate that there are 40,000 potential customers on the planet; I know you and I are not two of them, but some people appear to have a boatload of money to spend on a three-week vacation for one. A Pan Am space clipper sure would reduce the problems these folks are facing.