Sydney in 30 minutes

My mother grew up in Croydon, England after World War II, on a new estate built by the Attlee government where the roads were named after Great British authors. They lived on Coleridge Road, named after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By the mid 1950s her father bought a car, his pride and joy. Each Sunday, especially when the weather was nice, they would do something no-one would consider any more: they’d go for a drive. Half a century later what they used to do seems quaint. What has this got to do with going from London-Sydney in 30 minutes?

Soon, probably by 2011, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic will take its first astro-tourists into sub-orbital space – where people are high enough to feel weightlessness and get that Neil Armstrong view of the Earth. A big aircraft will take off from the Mojave Desert, Nevada, USA, carrying a space ship on its back, and that space ship will take off from the aircraft in mid-air. Then, another two years later, E.A.D.S., the European equivalent of N.A.S.A., will launch its first astro-tourist mission. There are a number of differences. For one, Philippe Starck is with Virgin Galactic, Marc Newson with E.A.D.S.. But the major difference is that astro-tourists who go with E.A.D.S. will go into sub-orbital space not in a spaceship, but a spaceplane.

The E.A.D.S. Astrium spaceplane will take off and land on a runway. In fact, on a conventional runway, the same sort that a normal airline jet, such as a 747 or an Airbus, uses. This means, E.A.D.S.’s Director of Communications, Jeremy Close told me, that it could in theory take off and land anywhere there’s a decent runway. In practice the world’s current commercial airports may be unsure of allowing it to, as the highly flammable liquid fuels the spaceplane uses may be considered unsafe, at first, to be near large numbers of people.

But the theory is good. And since the Earth is turning, the Astrium spaceplane could take off, go into space, let the Earth turn, and then land – anywhere. Which means that what will begin as sightseeing, will eventually become a faster more convenient way to get from A to B. In another fifty years, the first steps in space tourism will be seen as going for a drive. And we may be getting from London – Sydney in 30 minutes.