Your Spaceflight Manual

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. (April 2008)

Your Spaceflight Manual
UK 1st edition cover
Author	David Ashford and Patrick Collins
Country	UK
Language	English
Subject(s)	Space tourism, futures studies
Publisher	Headline Book Publishing
Publication date	1990
Pages	120
ISBN	ISBN 0-7472-0178-1

Your Spaceflight Manual is a non-fiction book by David Ashford and Patrick Collins that investigates the possibility of a future space tourism industry. It was first published in 1990. The book contains analysis of the costs and benefits, the potential market, and the safety factors of space tourism, and gives rough designs for the types of space vehicles and stations that would become necessary to support a full-fledged space tourism industry. This culminates with a description of a large space hotel (parts of which are spun to generate rotational artificial gravity) featuring attractions such as zero-gravity sports arenas and Earth-gazing observatories.

[edit] Predictions

The book gives a rough timeline of predictions for the future of space tourism, based on analogy with the history of commercial aviation.

2000-2005: Pioneering- Using Spacecab a very low orbit two-stage reusable spaceplane to achieve a few hours of free fall. Cost per flight: 1,000,000 USD

2005-2020: Exclusive- Again using Spacecab for a longer space trip, possibly visiting [International Space Station|ISS]. Cost per flight: 100,000 USD

2020-2050: Mature- Transport now by second generation Spacebus with accommodation in a large space hotel. Cost per flight: 10,000 USD

2050-Onwards: Mass use, Cost per flight: less than 10,000 USD

It predicts that the first space tourist would have flown around the year 2000. This proved accurate when the multimillionaire Dennis Tito paid for a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft in 2001. In 2005 the third space tourist, Gregory Olsen, paid an estimated 20 million USD for his trip to the International Space Station.