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Outfit for space tourism
Our
perception of the natural world is affected by constantly experiencing
through devices that simultaneously contextualize and distance. When we
are on vacation, we have become acoustomed to the need to photograph,
videotape, blog, post to Flickr. We re-present our experiences for others
and ourselves.
Jesus
proclaimed very explicitly: But in those days, after that tribulation,
the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the
stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will
be shaken. And then they will see the Son of man coming in clouds with
great power and glory. And then he will send his angels, and shall gather
his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends
of heaven (Mark 13:24-7) Fortunately, with nuclear, wind power, and nanotechnology,
the malls will be lit up 360 degrees, 6 days a
week.
Because
of its importance as a hub of commerce, service and entertainment, most
malls remain open seven days a week with hours ranging from early morning
to late at night. In fact, many malls keep lights on 24 hours a day and
are open for visitors even before or after store opening times. As a result,
good lighting that provides visibility and is inviting and attractive
without being glaring is a "must have" for customers and mall
personnel, particularly in those malls that are enclosed rather than open
malls where natural sunlight plays a more significant role. Many malls
develop a unique lighting scheme to create a unified, distinctive look,
including lights in color to enhance customer appeal.
THE
GEO-CHALLENGE: ALL THE WORLD IS A MALL
Nature
shapes culture and in turn, culture inevitably alters nature. When
will we arrive at the day that we find ourselves hiking up the idyllic
mountainside and, expecting to finally reach the serenity of an open field
or babbling brook (that we have only seen in some unearthed Gates/Corbis
image collection) and then low and behold - do our eyes deceive us?
No. Erected in front of us is a brand new earth-camoflage structure, an
earthy-topia none other than the Body Shop. And it finally all
makes sense, we are all visiting nature so we can recreate some idea of
nature IN BUSINESS FORM. We all need to invent our own way to sell our
sense of nature and natural beauty, no matter how unnatural (whatever
that is) it may be. Nature makes you feel good. Unfortunately,
we have put nature by the wayside. Instead of being outside enjoying nature,
you can find us in the mall buying products that may express our love
of and for nature, and may show our sense of social responsibility
for the earth.
Dedicated
Mallers may let you in on a hidden secret: the whole world has become
a mall. No longer is the mall an economically segregated safe
place to send our kids after school. Now, it is everything, from the
bush in your backyard, to what is left of the polar icecaps, and it is
the Body Shop hidden within the bushy hills of Muir Woods, California.
If you like nature, you LOVE the mall of nature. Come shop with
us! Places like the Mall of America have turned the mall's interior into
a representation of the outside world, jungles and all.
Like
Myspace, the mall is not only a place to network socially, but a place
to live in. Now, mobile commerce creates a world-wide datastructure built
on the premise of consuming. The mall is everywhere. The human’s
place in space is marked by consumption - the locations of spending habits
are tracked and sold back to the seven-firm
oligopolies, For Their Information (FTI) in an endless cycle of consumption.
Space’s main function and pervasive form is now Information Space.
Mall is the very essence of how culture will define itself. A
picture is assembled that confirms a continuity between the home and the
market-place, between various levels of artifice and nature and between
divergent and often distinct geographic locations.
Space
tourism may be just one of the services Virgin Galactic
ends up offering future customers. Last week it said its first tourist
space vehicle could also be used to launch satellites and make super-fast
intercity trips.
From next year, Virgin plans to run $200,000-a-time flights
from a spaceport in New Mexico. The launch vehicle is WhiteKnightTwo,
a four-engine jet aircraft. It has two fuselages joined by a wing that
supports a rocket called SpaceShipTwo. At an altitude of 52,000 feet (16
kilometres), the rocket will separate, taking the tourists to an altitude
of 140 kilometres for 5 minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views
of the Earth.
So far Virgin Galactic has banked $30 million in bookings. But four years
ago, when design began, the company had been unsure of demand, so it gave
the vehicles extra capacity. "This gave us a back-up business model,"
says company president Will Whitehorn.
Thanks to the central wing's carbon composite backbone, WhiteKnightTwo
will be 40 per cent stronger than it needs to be to support SpaceShipTwo.
"We'll be able to carry an unmanned rocket that can launch a 100-kilogram
micro-satellite," Whitehorn says. Another option will be to design
a vehicle with the fuel capacity to carry passengers in a rapid, sub-orbital
flight to the far side of the world.
Tourists training for their space adventure will also be able to ride
in one of the fuselages to get a brief taste of weightlessness as the
jet enters a zero-gravity parabolic dive on the way back, Whitehorn says.-New
Scientist 02 February 2008
Travel and tourism
is one of the world's largest businesses. Its gross revenues exceed $400
billion per year in the U.S. alone, and it is our second largest employer.
In an interview, Jacob Lopata, chief of a company called
Space Launch, said that space tourism is expected to be a billion-dollar
market within the next 10 years. “Technology advances and events
like the Ansari X Prize, a relatively new $10 million contest for private
spacecraft, have made that a possibility,” he said.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is constructing
a 200 million-dollar space station in New Mexico. US firm Space Adventures
will soon begin launching from the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.
Tourists will be able to go on a 90 minute $100,000 suborbital flight
to the edge of space. Space Adventures hopes to send passengers around
the moon in 2009.
Zero-gravity aircraft trips are becoming widely available,
and other trips using a new kind of vehicle taking people up to very high
altitudes should become available within the next few years. And the Shuttle
fleet, now becoming privatized, could carry a very few of our general
public to orbit every year for general public space tourism research and
merchandising purposes.
To move beyond this to generally available trips to orbit and week-long
stays in hotels now can be seen as certainly feasible, and some of the
required basic space transportation and habitation technological-operational
advances required to do so are already underway.
In 1999, Las Vegas native, Robert Bigelow founded Bigelow
Aerospace ("BA"). Bigelow Aerospace is a Las Vegas, Nevada
space technology start-up company that is pioneering work on expandable
space station modules. An expandable module is a space structure that
has a flexible outer shell, allowing conservation of diameter for launch.
Once in orbit, the module is inflated, allowing greater work, play, and
living area for astronauts.
The company has announced development of a family of prototype and production
space station modules, including: the Genesis-1, a one-third
scale prototype module weighing approximately 3,000 pounds, 15 feet (5
meters) in length and 6.2 feet (1.9 meters) in diameter, expanding to
twice the diameter once in orbit.
On July 12, 2006, the Genesis-1 launched on a Dnepr booster
from Yasny Launch Base in Siberia. The launch was conducted by
Bigelow and ISC Kosmotras. The mission is planned to
last for five years and include extensive observation of the craft's performance
including testing packing/deployment procedures and resistance to radiation
and space debris, among other space hazards and conditions. Mike Gold,
corporate counsel for Bigelow Aerospace, stated in relation to this mission
and the next, “Our motto at Bigelow Aerospace is ‘fly early
and often’. Regardless of the results of Genesis-1, we will launch
a follow-up mission rapidly,” indicating that the Genesis 2 is on
track for its launch later this year. According to the Bigelow web site
the Genesis I spacecraft has successfully expanded and all of the solar
arrays have been deployed.
The geniuss' at BA have come up with the "Fly your stuff
program". In 2006 Bigelow Aerospace announced its Fly your
stuff program. This program is designed to allow private citizens to have
their pictures or small items launched into space for $295 per item. These
items will then be photographed by cameras aboard the Genesis II craft.
With the successful launch and program test of Genesis I on items from
Bigelow staff, the Genesis II is now scheduled to fly with the items and
pictures from customers in early 2007. Already, private
interests are working on initial space trip vehicle designs, and travel
and tourism business interests are offering initial space trip services
that could begin in the next few years. It is hoped that this report will
draw wide attention to a fundamentally new human dimension of space that
can and should be created, and to suggest ways by which many of us can
help to see this come about responsibly and at a relatively early moment.
The future is upon us.
In
2005, Popular Science (via Caveat lector ) had a cover story about the
Robert Bigelow project to build a 330-cubic-meter orbiting space hotel.
Bargain-basement room rate: $1 million a night.
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