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Some days you just want to get away from it all... preferably
somewhere in deep space.
It was only natural
as man started his conquest of space people started to ask one of the
eternal questions: When is the first package tour leaving?
In 2001: a Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick depicted the 21st
century as a time when space travel wasn't just routine, it was banal.
Take the Pan Am shuttle to
Station V and you'd find all
the familiar signs of any busy '60s airport. You could check in at the Hilton, grab a quick cup of
coffee from the vending machine, call home at the ATT picturephone
booth, then on to the Howard Johnson's Earthlight Room for supper.
Even the decor would be the same: flat, white panelling; wall to wall,
painfully bright fluorescent lighting; and lounge furniture that was
never designed to sat in by any form of human life. The future
never looked brighter.
Not
that space holidays were a product of the '60s. In 1955
Disneyland featured its TWA Rocket to the Moon, where tourists could
experience what a day trip to the Moon would supposedly be like.
Not only that, but the trip was a regularly scheduled TWA flight.
The Disney "Moonliner," which was the centrepiece of Tomorrowland into
the 1970s, was a remarkable embodiment of how the 1950s envisioned a
fully developed passenger spaceship of 1986. It was eighty feet
tall, shaped like a V2 rocket and wasn't one of those inelegant
multiple stage affairs that the government was playing with.
This was a single-stage atomic affair with neatly compact, retractable
landing gear as functional as an airliner's; a cockpit (which was
singularly lacking in most fictional space rockets of the day); and a
boarding ramp for passengers that would have been quite at home in a
modern airport.
If Moon rockets really were like this in1986, we'd have all been a lot
happier.
Certainly
Pan Am would have been.
When the Apollo
missions were in full swing there was a heady, though short lived,
optimism about the future of space travel. This reached such a
pitch that when Apollo 8 went into orbit around the Moon, Julian
Trippe, president of Pan Am, announced that his airline was now taking
reservations for the first commercial Moon flights in the year 2000.
This may sound a bit crazy, as the Moon was an arid wasteland and
had no hotels or other tourist amenities, but that didn't stop travel
agents from booking tours to Spain at the time. The public
jumped at the idea and by 1971 Pan Am had 93,000 reservations for
flights that did not exist. What is even stranger is that
something of a price war went on. The flights were initially
pegged at $28,000 (return), but Werner Von Braun was predicting
regular service by 2000 and Thomas Paine, NASA administrator in 1969,
predicted that fares would drop to $5000 by 1990. Was this due
to overestimating improvements in technology or because TWA announced
that it was getting into the Moon flight business? Who can say?
All that is certain is that when the year 2000 clocked in there
weren't any commercial flights to the Sea of Tranquillity, but then,
Pan Am wasn't around to honour those reservations either.
On the other hand, space tourism had arrived, but only as far as the
International Space Station and at a set fare of $20,000,000
(coach).
Some days you just want to get away from it all... preferably
somewhere in deep space. 
Not
that space holidays were a product of the '60s. In 1955
Disneyland featured its TWA Rocket to the Moon, where tourists could
experience what a day trip to the Moon would supposedly be like.
Certainly
Pan Am would have been.