As the industry continues to mature, air travel
has become the safest and most reliable means
of getting from point A to B. The National
Safety Council in the U.S provides statistics
illustrating how 1 in 7,229 people die on an
aircraft compared to the 1 in 749 fatalities of
pedestrians - meaning you have more chance
of meeting your maker while walking down the
street than jet-setting across timezones.
BEYOND THE SKIES
Today, our need to explore the vastness of outer
space has inspired a multitude of organisations
such as the X Prize foundation, encouraging
innovative ways of making commercial
spaceflight a reality. In 1995, the foundation
offered a $10mn prize for any NGO to, “launch
a reusable manned spacecraft into space
twice within two weeks” - a total of twenty-six
teams entered the Ansari X Prize. The winning
spacecraft being the SpaceShip One.
The organisation motivated the founding of
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which
inspired the development of SpaceShip Two
(SS2) - a collaborative effort between Scaled
Composites and Virgin Galactic, pioneering
commercial space travel.
The SS2 is a suborbital, air-launched spacecraft,
designed for space tourism which Virgin
Galactic will use to whisk ordinary individuals
on an hour and a half trip into space and back provided they have a quarter of a million dollars
to spare.
VIRGIN GALACTIC
WILL WHISK
ORDINARY
INDIVIDUALS ON AN
HOUR AND A HALF
T R I P I N T O S PA C E
LIFE BEYOND EARTH?
With space travel on the verge of becoming an
everyday norm, we can confidently speculate
what the future looks like. Perhaps we might
start colonising the moon and begin our exodus
- possibly leading to the discovery of new,
unknown minerals on other planets, which
may be capable of curing the most stubborn of
diseases plaguing our world.
Only time will tell how far innovators will push
the bar as we accelerate towards the uncertain
and unexplored fascination of the cosmos.
By Amanda Nkwinika
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IMBO/ ISSUE 31/ '14