Elite Traveler March-April 2015

elite traveler MAR/APR 2015 ISSUE 2 101

20 2020? Virgin Galactic; claims to have almost 600 takers for flights on SpaceshipTwo

2020? Blue Origin; developing a vertical take off and landing spaceship

2020? Armadillo Aerospace; set up by designer of video games Doom and Quake

2020? XCOR; is developing the two-seater Lynx spaceplane

20 2020? Space X; the brainchild of Tesla

Motors' Elon Musk aims to revolutionise access to space

the wreck of the Titanic (at 12,000+ ft), with more currently in the pipeline. At $60,000 per seat, these are a snip compared to space trips. All this is extremely exciting, yet frontier travel is about to push further into an even more exotic territory – namely, the human mind. Anyone who has seen Total Recall , either version, adapted from a story by sci-fi master Philip K Dick ( We Can Remember it For You Wholesale ), will regard the idea of being wired up to a computer and being taken on a “virtual” holiday as a fictional fancy, but in the next few years such an experience may become available. Virtual reality (VR) machines involving helmet- like headsets into which computers project 3-D images have been discussed and partially developed since the 1990s, but a series of seemingly insurmountable technical challenges meant that most were abandoned. Then came a game-mad teenager named Palmer Luckey, who found a way to solve the chief problem faced by would-be VR developers: that any latency (failure of the image to keep up with the user’s motion) caused a form of motion sickness. A prototype of Luckey’s “Rift” system in 2012 excited the interest of some big tech names and resulted in his company, Oculus, being bought by Facebook 24 months later for a staggering $2bn. Now the Oculus Rift is slated for release later this year or early in 2016 and will likely be met by a rival Sony system. What these groundbreaking new machines aim to do is create “presence”, turning the principle of suspension of disbelief on its head by creating worlds so realistic that our brains are incapable of distinguishing them from physical reality; creating a subjective experience that is equally real. Thereafter, of course, the distance from the Moon to Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench – or Barbados with Angelina or George on your arm for that matter – is all the same.

flight aboard a specially-developed Russian spaceship, the first such flight since 1972, and expected to launch in 2017, for a cool $150m. Not bad value when you think about it. At the same time, plans for space ports are springing up across America and around the globe. Jack Kennedy is on the board of directors at Wallops Island in Virginia, one of the frontrunners in this new aviation enterprise. “I’ve never been more excited about space than I am now,” he says. “NASA was resistant at first, but what private companies are doing is allowing them to focus on the science and frontier – it’s a cultural paradigm shift, the yin and yang of space efforts. I think the Obama administration has conceded near space to the private sector, while encouraging NASA to focus on big projects such as meteor capture and going to Mars. Thank goodness SpaceX was successful.” We know less about the ocean depths than we do about space, so it’s hardly surprising to find them just as inaccessible. I’ve been under the waves aboard a Royal Navy nuclear hunter-killer submarine and it was an extraordinary experience, but not one for tourists because you can’t see outside (neither would sleeping next to a Spearfish torpedo appeal to everyone, I suspect). So it may come as a surprise to learn that more intimate visits are available. In 2012, film director James Cameron, a keen explorer in his spare time, built and piloted a submersible called the Deepsea Challenger to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, at 36,000 feet, proving that such a thing could be done privately. At some point, Cameron’s technology will no doubt reach the rest of us, but in the meantime several companies offer dives of up to 3,000 feet, while upmarket concierge service Bluefish can take you to depths of 20,000 feet in a Soviet Mir craft – deep enough to visit the hydrothermal vents around which cluster ecosystems so bizarre that their discovery in the 1970s changed our view of the likelihood of life on other worlds. More specifically, in 2013 Bluefish organized two expeditions to