Once upon a time, barnstorming over the countryside in a biplane was sufficiently thrilling and expensive for the idle rich. Then, the only thing that would do was taking a steamer to Africa to blast away at lions for the season. Then there was (and remains) the curious habit of paying a small fortune for the privilege of expiring on Mt. Everest from hypothermia, oxygen deprivation, or stumbling into a crevasse. Much later, attempting to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon, a la Sir Richard Branson, did the trick.
More recently, megabuck tourism has gone into orbit. Several people have paid tens of millions to hang out on the International Space Station. Soon, people will pay a few hundred thousand for suborbital joyrides.
But it gets better. The era of space tourism one-upmanship is here. How about space diving?
In case skydiving seemed terrifying enough for you, consider the world's most extreme sport. While traveling 18,000 mph in orbit, you leap out of your ship in a shuttlecock-shaped heat shield to keep you from broiling on your way through the upper atmosphere. After deploying drogue chutes and perhaps firing small retrorockets, you deploy a normal parachute and land safely.
Crazy? Yes, of course. "Scary as hell," one JPL employee commented to the press. But not impossible. (To learn more about it, read the recent article in Popular Science by one of the best magazine science writers in the business, William Speed Weed.)
There is already a company, Orbital Outfitters, actively planning super-high-diving space jumps. In the meantime, they are pretty busy designing a standard-issue spacesuit with enough high-tech bling to please wealthy space tourists. The company will eventually be prepared to sell you a custom suit for $50,000 to $80,000, although you can rent one for $5,000 to $7,000 per flight.
Not crazy enough for you? OK, then think about going to the Moon. A Virginia-based company, Space Adventures, says it will boomerang you around the Moon using Russian Soyuz spacecraft. This will cost an estimated $200 million per couple.
The moon ride is pretty hard to top. But I have come up with something.
NASA wants to go to Mars, Congress probably won't pay for it, but the entertainment industry is flush with cash from reality shows. What about "Survivor: Mars"?
It goes like this: A conglomerate of entertainment companies provides matching funds to NASA to send a gaggle of well-groomed, suntanned, and gullible contestants to Mars for a 2-year mission. While on Mars, they have to complete various tasks — setting up a pressurized greenhouse to grow food, hiking to the South Pole to gather water, setting up a plant to produce rocket fuel for the return trip. Whoever is left alive at the end of the mission wins.
The only thing I haven't worked out is where the people would go who are voted out of base camp. Phobos?