Space: crossing the final frontier

It's been 40 years since man first landed on the moon. Now, Richard Branson and other buccaneers are paving the way for space tourism. Simon Wilson investigates whether it is yet a reality, and what the future holds for space exploration.

Is space tourism a reality?

Not yet. But the sceptics who dismissed Richard Branson and similar buccaneers with plans for mass space tourism may soon have to eat their words. Earlier this month Virgin Galactic unveiled its first commercial passenger spaceship at a ceremony in California's Mojave desert. The sleek, black and white 18-metre long vessel is capable of taking six passengers and two pilots for a brief trip into space. Virgin has already taken $4m in deposits from 300 paying customers (a ticket costs $200,000). If all goes to plan, the Virgin Space Ship VSS Enterprise will be flying commercially within two years. After blasting up high enough to achieve weightlessness, and see the curvature of the Earth against the backdrop of space, passengers will glide back down to Earth. Flights will take off from New Mexico, with Sweden and Abu Dhabi to follow.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.