Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 30, 1993 TAG: 9308300105
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES SCHULTZ LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium
Suddenly the engines go silent, and there is the arc of Earth, unbelievably blue, framed by small windows on the side of the cabin. The only sound is the click and whir of cameras as the space tourists, speechless, angle for the snapshot of a lifetime.
This voyage has yet to take place. But someday it might, if Virginia Beach resident and former astronaut Byron K. Lichtenberg has anything to do with it.
"You go out and talk about space tourism, and people look at you like you're crazy," he said. "You have to come up with a program that's financially feasible. Like anything else, it has to start small and realistically."
Small, in this case, means $1 million a flight, roughly $50,000 a ticket to send 20 travelers into orbit for several hours. That's maybe two to three times the average worker's annual take-home pay: No more, Lichtenberg says, than the Jamestown colonists spent to cross the Atlantic in 1607.
Lichtenberg is betting that, within the next 10 years, a new generation of reusable rockets will lower launch costs enough to open space travel to all comers.
Growing up in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, Lichtenberg devoured the books of Robert Heinlein, whose heroes and heroines struggled for a foothold in a space wilderness. Lichtenberg was 9 years old when Sputnik shocked the world.
He aced math and science and by 1969 had a degree in aerospace engineering from Brown University in Providence, R.I.
From there, Lichtenberg entered an Air Force pilot training program and went to Vietnam, flying 138 combat missions and winning 10 air medals and two Distinguished Flying Crosses. By the early 1970s, he was in graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would earn a doctorate in biomedical engineering by 1979.
Ten years ago, Lichtenberg became the nation's first civilian outside of NASA to fly in space. As an independent contractor payload specialist, he conducted about 70 experiments on board Spacelab 1, the first international laboratory to ride in a NASA space shuttle.
Lichtenberg's second shuttle flight was in March 1992 when he conducted studies on Earth's upper atmosphere and the effects of solar radiation on climate.
But these days, Lichtenberg, 45, is having a little trouble getting his ideas off the launch pad. His consulting arrangements are drying up, victims of shrinking space-science budgets and uncertainty about the future of space exploration. He's hunting for a full-time job, most likely as a commercial airline pilot.
Lichtenberg concedes that his space tourism idea is "light years away" from being realized. "At some point, we're going to need a sugar daddy," he said. "In this budget climate, they're not easy to find. It's real tough."
Lichtenberg hopes that one day space tourists will be able to board a sightseeing rocket that would launch out of the NASA rocket facility at Wallops Island on Virginia's Eastern Shore.
Once above the Earth, tourists would be treated to sights previously reserved for a handful of astronauts. Such a view, Lichtenberg believes, would forever change the way the citizens of Earth feel and act toward their home planet.
"It's a real adventure-exploration kind of a thing," he mused. "It's wrapping on your fur coat and sitting in the cockpit with the wind whipping in your face. It's being among the first group of explorers."
by CNB