It's time for space tourism
When millionaire Dennis Tito paid $20 mn to vacation in the vacuum of space, it put tourism in focus for me. It seems the Russians had forgotten to pack space sickness bags in the Soyuz craft, and Tito needed them - badly. They proffered 'hygienic tissues' instead. I only hope they had a business class lounge for him at the Baikonur space station.
Of course Tito follows in a long tradition of tourism as the monetization of masochism. People pay lots of money to be burnt in the sun, frozen, eaten alive by bugs and to get various forms of Third World revenge on their alimentary canals.
And far from welcoming the first tourist in space and inviting him to dine at the captain's table, the US space station commander was somewhat offhand with his orbitally uppity compatriot. Nor was he happy when the Russians filmed a Radio Shack commercial in orbit. It's funny that the Americans, longtime promulgators of free enterprise, got snippy with the Russians for commercializing space. But I suppose being in space makes it as difficult to know your left from your right as it is to tell up from down. Tito's trip and the commercial were arranged through MirCorp, a Dutch corporation that had planned to use the Mir space station commercially since the Russians couldn't afford it anymore. There was even a planned IPO of the company. I suppose that Mir was a more tangible product than many of the dot-coms that have now burnt up on reentry into the real world.
After all, it would only have taken a half dozen or so millionaires a year to pay to keep the space station in orbit. However, it should have worried someone that James Cameron, the director of Titanic, expressed interest in putting money into it as a tourist operation. No-one who remembered what happened to the real Titanic should have been too surprised when the Mir Station plunged into the ocean a few months later.
Apart from wondering whether he was clocking up 20,000 frequent-flier miles for each orbit, it also occurred to me that Tito was hardly the first tourist to lose touch with terrestriality as we know it. Anyone who goes on one of those cruise ships around the Caribbean has been in fiscal orbit. The operators are off-shore corporations with no known terran abode. They pay no taxes anywhere that anyone can recognize, and are crewed by aliens (in the legal sense at least).
I can see the attraction to the operators, but I have never really seen the attraction for customers. To be crammed with thousands of guzzling tourists in a floating hotel, with a potentially horrendous food-poisoning epidemic, is my idea of a purgatory that you try to escape from, not something you save up for.
Everyone says the future lies in knowledge-based industries, but tourism is an anti-knowledge industry based on dumbing the world down to the lowest and commonest denominator. One of the few areas where tourism makes sense for me is the Caribbean, where there are beaches, warm water and lots of rum - not to mention good music.
Tourism even makes sense for the island states, since the US is currently trying to strangle their banana exports, disapproves of ganja production in general, and is not overly enthusiastic about dishing out green cards.
So it was a shock to discover that the operators have difficulty raising capital. Sipping rum round the edges of the Caribbean Hotels Association investment conference in Curacao, hotel operators complained they could not raise equity capital for idyllic beachside hotels, not even from local savers and institutions.
But if they can put money into sending vacationers vacuum bathing in outer space, or transporting them in floating chicken coops from island to island, then they should reorder their priorities. Clearly it all has to do with location. Just look at Baikonur. The Russian space station is smack in the middle of the bleakest Kazakh desert where, as we recently established, local haute cuisine consists of the inside of the wrong end of horses, and the beach goes all the way to the oil-polluted fringes of the Caspian.
What we need is MirCorp-meets-Club Med. Would-be space resort operators should be looking to open their launch facilities in the Caribbean, near the equator where physics, aesthetics and economics conspire to offer the perfect sun-kissed location. The training facilities should be on the beach, with weightless training facilities tied to weight-reduction clinics. After all, it takes a lot of fuel to blast each pound of affluently adipose tissue into orbit, so a slim cosmo-tourist is an ecologically friendly one. And if you were being blasted into a perilous, multimillion-dollar vacuum vacation, would you rather spend your last days on Earth with skimpily clad sun-bronzed Caribbean types, or with a pile of pale, doughy, overdressed ex-Soviet veterans of the KGB charm school?
As an added boost to the islands' economies, local over-proof rum production would not only soak up all that world sugar surplus, it could even serve as rocket booster fuel. Indeed, if any of the cosmo-tourists drink it, they may well think they are in orbit anyway. Watch out for my Med-Mir IPO sometime soon.
The Speculator