The Future Has Come Sneaking In Upon Us

Interstellar spaceflight is still far away, but the beginnings are already here.

A sizeable chunk of science fiction features cheap interplanetary travel where zooming off to the moons of Saturn is an afternoon sightseeing affair. Some of the stories go into the technical details of what made such travel possible, while some do not.

The ones which do so often describe it in one of two ways -

 - In terms of contemporary science extrapolated to a seemingly logical breakthrough
 - In terms of a completely unfamiliar technology (hyperdrive, stardrive) peppered with future sounding jargon (along the lines of Clarke's 'indistinguishable from magic')

Fiction apart, how far have we actually gone along that path? When was the last time you bought a ticket to the moon? It seems like once we make those breakthoughs, manufacture those magical drives, we can just soar off into space. It all seems to be far away in the future!

Well, not really.

On June 21, 2004, the spaceplane SpaceShipOne completed the first privately funded manned spaceflight. And that's more than 5 years ago.

The important point to note here is that it was privately funded. Space travel (or the beginnings of cheap space travel) is not in the hands of the world's governments any more. SpaceShipOne was designed by Burt Rutan (of Voyager fame - the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refuelling) and funded by Paul Allen (of Microsoft). Although not a spacecraft as we scifi buffs would understand it, SpaceShipOne represents a crucial achievement for multiple reasons - it's reusable, it broke the Kármán line (recognized as the boundary to outer space), it kicked off lots of parallel industries in the process and it rekindled worldwide interest in the space program.

SpaceShipOne also won the Ansari X prize - a worldwide competition for launching the first private manned spacecraft. The fact that this competition was participated in by 26 teams shows the level of enthusiasm and development that is going on in this area.

In the near future (within 5 years) we will have tourist trips to near-Earth orbit. Richard Branson's corporation Virgin Galactic is already accepting bookings. Of course, these are for the super rich only. It will be quite some time (yes, we need that breakthrough!) before suborbital flights become commonplace. Till then, we scifi buffs have our books and space simulators.