‘Where are you going for your holiday?’ ‘I think I will try space. I just love the feeing I experience when I look down on our planet earth as the space ship soars through the milky way.” Although this may sound far - fetched or like a conversation in a science fiction movie, it is actually happening now and will become more common in the future. From Virgin Galactic to Spacex, Blue Origin or Space Adventures and a couple of other companies, you can get a trip of a life time, should you wish, or more important, afford it! Space is already becoming another tourist destination and as others have coined it, ‘the final frontier’! Until the next frontier of course! One of the trips is actually happening as early as March, 2018 (Blue Origin) – that is just about only four months from now! There are a number of tourists that have visited and enjoyed the space trip, starting from the first space tourist, Dennis Tito way back in 2001. Instead of rockets, we are talking about launching human beings like you and me to the edge of space and beyond imagine how awesome that is! If you so decide to go to outer space and your wallet or money purse agrees with the steep prices that range from twenty million dollars per seat - no less - on the Spacex Dragon Space trip to 250. 000 dollars on the Virgin Galactic where you can rub shoulders with the world’s richest rich, like the film stars, oil barons, name them. Or you may choose to take the one time, never come back trip to Mars in 2023. The good news is that it is free, if you volunteer, you just get picked and trained for eight years on how to be a Martian as you will be staying there for good! But why is it so expensive? As you may have guessed, Space travel is in its initial stages of trail and error and therefore requires massive funding to improve all sorts of aspects such as the safety and the actual ability of the space craft to force its way through the gravity and actually take a trip around the space. Who else is better suited to sponsor this than those with spending cash? Who knows soon we might be taking a shopping trip to space, for things and matching prices that are truly, ‘out of this world!’ A quick question - would you take this trip? Lois Nakibuuka is an educator and counsellor lnakibuuka@yahoo.com
