Space: Final Frontier

The U.S. space shuttle program, suspended since the February 2003 Columbia accident, will resume next month. At the same time, private sector moves to make commercial space travel, which will allow paying passengers to take flights more 100 kilometers above Earth, a reality are gaining momentum.

Entrepreneurs are putting up big money to make a market in space tourism before the end of the decade, and some are seriously eyeing orbital vacations. With SpaceShipOne set for its second experimental hop on Wednesday, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson on Monday announced a deal to license SpaceShipOne's technology for commercial suborbital flights by 2007.

The guide book has already been written. When the first Shuttle-load of tourists touch down on the Sea of Tranquillity, they can consult a guide to the Moon, published this year by a Californian company with the appropriate name of Moon Publications. Space tourism is here, and it's big business. Even in election year in Washington DC, the White House tour loses out in visitor interest to the Air and Space Museum. Within a mile, the tourist to the American capital can see two great early Sixties icons: the portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis hanging in the hub of government; or the tiny Mercury...

"Coffee, tea, or Tang?" The flight attendant minces down the aisle, gravity boots squeaking as she goes, disseminating drinks and tubes of peanut paste. Out the window, the Earth is turning into the now-familiar blue marble first observed in the 1960s. Closing in, the Man in the Moon is dissolving into craters and rises, a sci-fi impressionist painting up close.

If most space travel will be by tourists, think of Paul Sipiera as a tour guide. Sipiera, 37, is one of a dozen advisers to a privately run program that plans to orbit paying passengers starting on Columbus Day, 1992. His fee? A free seat on many of the flights.

From the Time archives: STAR TREK (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). A cruiser-size rocket ship, called the U.S.S. Enterprise and captained by William Shatner, investigates new worlds and unimagined civilizations in deep space. First episode: "The Man Trap."

From the Time archives: Hope that a future astronaut might some day find life on Mars faded deeper than ever into science fiction when Mariner 4 sent its remarkable snapshots across 135 million miles of space. The bleak, pocked surface of the red planet looked dead indeed. Because they saw no signs of erosion, space specialists from Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratories, who had directed the Mariner voyage, concluded that Mars probably never had any significant amount of life-supporting water. Though they were not quite ready to deny the possibility of Martian life, the JPL men seemed all but...

From the Time archives: For an endless, heart-stopping moment, the tall, slim rocket hung motionless %u2014incredibly balanced above its incandescent tail. Slowly it climbed the sky, outracing the racket of its engine as it screamed toward space. In the returning silence, the amplified thump of an electronic timer beat like a pulse across the sands of Florida's Cape Canaveral. The pulse of the nation beat with it. For this was no routine rocket shoot. Riding that long, white missile as it soared aloft last week was Navy Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr., first U.S. astronaut ever fired into space....

From the Time archives: Triumphant music blared across the land. Russia's radios saluted the morning with the slow, stirring beat of the patriotic song, How Spacious Is My Country. Then came the simple announcement that shattered forever man's ancient isolation on earth: "The world's first spaceship, Vostok [East], with a man on board, has been launched on April 12 in the Soviet Union on a round-the-world orbit."

From the Time archives: With the Russian satellite still revolving around the earth, the public is beginning to accept it as a normal part of the solar system. But the public is also asking questions about the implications of the satellite

From the Time archives: Hurtling unseen, hundreds of miles from the earth, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball passed over the world's continents and oceans one day last week. As it circled the globe for the first time, traveling at 18,000 mph, the US was blissfully unaware that a new era in history had begun, opening a bright new chapter in mankind's conquest of the natural environment and a grim new chapter in the cold war.

From the Time archives: Somebody is always rising to announce that mankind has arrived at a dead end, or at least a stop light. In the October issue of Harper's, a new warning voice rolls out, announcing that civilization's "400-year boom" is over because civilized nations have no more geographical frontiers to push back. The voice comes, oddly enough, from Texas. It belongs to Professor Walter Prescott Webb, a thoughtful student of history. In Manhattan, some 300 scientists, doctors, astronomers, engineers, aviators and lawyers were too busy to hear it. They were gathered at the Hayden Planetarium...

From the Time archives: Astronauts (people who dream of traveling through interstellar space) have been sleeping dreamlessly since the war began. Reasons: 1) lack of materials for building space ships; 2) the drafting of astronauts for more immediate work on military rockets. But by last week many enthusiasts were stirring in their sleep and dreaming again of the interplanetary takeoff. "Flight into outer space," exclaimed Harry Harper, a spokesman for the new Combined British Astronautical Societies, "is no longer a Jules Verne or Wellsian dream." His British group includes able young chemists,...