Click To View Slideshow» If you really wanted to, you could purchase a ticket to space right now.
A little over a half-century ago, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to reach outer space. This amazing feat sparked the space race, during which humanity was convinced space exploration would transform everything.
This adorable age of optimism was perhaps best illustrated by Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: a Space Odyssey, which appeared to be a completely plausible vision of the not-so-distant future. This naïve hopefulness was completely understandable. The nation had just watched the automobile transition from a primitive sputter boxes into sleek metal-encased muscle cars over the course of a few decades. So surely, space technology (with all those computers and whatnot) would evolve even quicker.
Fast forward to the real 2001, and it became painfully obvious that that whole space thing wasn't going to pan out quite how Kubrick had predicted. As of writing, only about 500 humans have ever been to space. Ever. That's not very impressive. BUT we may now finally be embarking on a new era of approachable space travel.
Over the past few decades, a number of well-enumerated individuals have paid their way into the heavens, including video game pioneer Richard Garriott, who paid a few million dollars to spend two weeks aboard the ISS. In fact, following the demise of NASA's space shuttle program, space exploration has made the jump into the private sector. Various for-profit entities like SpaceX are working on novel ways to make space travel accessible to more than Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs.
Don't get me wrong. Space travel is still prohibitively expensive for 99 percent of anyone reading this. But the fact that these services are at least available should give everyone hope. The history of technology continually demonstrates that prices come down with time, and the same should be true of space travel. Check out the slideshow for a look at companies that want to sell you a ticket to space right now (including a few where the sticker shock might not be so disheartening).
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