Father and son - future space tourists - watch the Sun rise from Earth orbit.
It was Christmas Eve 1968. Three men — Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders — were coasting 100 km above the Moon, the first astronauts to ever circle it. From inside their tiny Apollo 8 command capsule, they pointed a TV camera toward Earth, showing millions of viewers back home what no one had ever seen before. They snapped a famous picture — Earthrise — of our blue world ascending above the lunar horizon. And then they read aloud the story of creation according to the Book of Genesis.
Back home, a record TV audience was watching. When transmission ended 17 minutes later, an announcer broke the reverie to breathlessly report that Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American — one of the world's largest airlines at the time — had announced that Pan Am would start taking reservations for commercial passenger flights to the Moon.
The next day, The New York Times reported that Pan Am had been deluged with inquiries and had established a First Moon Flights Club — effectively, a glorified waiting list for space tourists. Within days, Trans-World Airlines followed suit.
It wasn't just Apollo fever, although there was a lot of that at the time. People took the news seriously because Trippe was a visionary – he believed flying was to be enjoyed and did more than anyone else to make air travel affordable. He pioneered economy 'tourist class' seats in his planes, angering competitors and leading to Pan Am being banned from landing at many airports — including all those in Great Britain.
So, instead, he flew to other destinations, traffic boomed and, eventually, the airline cartel yielded. He introduced cut-price fares, like a US$275 ticket from New York to London, about half the going rate of the day (but still around A$2,260 in today's money — which, given a one-way trip these days can be purchased for less than A$400, goes to show how much air travel has fallen in price).
He convinced Boeing to design and build planes more than double the size of what was then the industry standard — the 707. What we now know as 747 Jumbo Jets were built because Trippe believed volume would bring costs down. "If you build it, I'll buy it," Trippe told Boeing's chief executive, Bill Allen. "If you buy it," replied Allen, "I'll build it."
"My kind of guys," wrote Richard Branson in a 1998 profile of Trippe for Time magazine. These days the British billionaire is himself an airline tycoon, tweaking the nose of competitors with cut-price flights and eyebrow-raising on-board services like bars, beauty therapists and massages. He too was once captured by the excitement of Apollo and believed that the age of space travel for everyone would soon arrive.
But the futuristic vision Trippe dangled in front of the young Branson and millions of other impressionable children of the 1960s didn't come to pass as they had anticipated. There were no Pan Am shuttles rocketing up to spinning space hotels orbiting the Earth (as envisaged in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey), no vacations on the Moon with shiny spacesuits and lunar buggies. So, when Branson and his generation grew up, it was clear that, if they wanted to see a future of holidays in space, they would have to build it themselves.
Space, the next frontier (Australian style)
Last year, in the southern most state on the mainland of Australia, we opened the only space science education centre in the Southern Hemisphere.
With no money at all from a federal government that is so mentally antiquated that they await the next voyage of Christopher Columbus, the Centre was funded by the state government. A few private dollars have helped, but to be honest more investment would help create even more than what they have already achieved.
A 'fake' Martian surface where kids must design experiments, build robots, do soil and other tests while dressed as astronauts in gear, and then follow up in labs that make the average school look paleolithic.
State of the art computer labs, specific courses in space science for biology, chemistry and physics.
This is the very sort of education facility that will train the next generation of space travellers.