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Gap Year in Space
Ben Holder
Gap Year in Space: Text
Bruce Hopkins space walking in 2013 ©NASA
Gap Year in Space: Text
In April 2019 Traveler IV became the first ever student built rocket to reach space, flying to just over 62 miles (100km), showing that getting to space is becoming ever more realistic for ordinary people.
Gap Year in Space: Testimonials
Traveler IV blasts off ©USCRPL
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So how long until you can take a gap year in space, and where would you go? The Russian Space Agency have been taking paying guests to the International Space Station (ISS) for nearly twenty years, Dennis Tito was the first in 2001, paying a reported $20m (£15m) for the trip. But space tourism is getting cheaper, Virgin Galactic are banking on space tourism taking off, offering 6 minutes of weightlessness at 100 miles (160km) above the Earth for $200,000 (£150,000). Not far enough into space? The ISS orbits at around 250 miles (400km) up, last year NASA said it would cost around $35,000 (£27,000) a day to stay there, a lot more reasonable, until you factor in the extra $60m (£45m) for SpaceX or Boeing to take you there on one of their rockets. Still not far enough? SpaceX has recently taken a deposit from billionaire Yusaku Maesawa to fly him around the moon sometime after 2023, price unknown.
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Will ‘space-cations’ ever get cheap enough for students? Since commercial airlines became popular in the 1950’s ticket costs have reduced by 95%, so by 2085 it might be possible to get into orbit for $3m (£2.3m). Still pretty astronomical for a holiday, so how about a gap year working in space then? Vacancies are scarce, but youth is no barrier to off world employment, the youngest person to reach space so far was 25 year-old Russian, Gherman Titov, in 1961.
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And so to the elephant orbiting the room, the environmental cost. So far there’s little regulation or research on rocket emissions, but overcoming gravity is an energy intensive business. One Falcon Heavy launch like the one that propelled Elon Musk’s Tesla into orbit around the sun is equivalent to around 75 transatlantic flights. But what if there was another way to escape Earth’s pull? Scientists have long dreamed of a space elevator, a 62,000 mile (100,000 km) carbon cable stretching from Earth to an orbiting space station. Hoisting cargo and people up such a cable would be much more efficient than using a rocket because it avoids the extra weight of fuel, up to 95% of a rocket’s mass. It’s a long way off, but a number of organisations are investing in it, and the tech is being tested already.
Gap Year in Space: Image
Artist’s impression of a space elevator ©Bruce Irving
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In the meantime, while space is still unattainable for most of us, there are ways to get involved without leaving Earth. The European Space Agency, SpaceX and NASA all run internship schemes (a student on the NASA scheme has just discovered a planet), UKSEDS is the UK’s national student space society, and Space Careers posts vacancies in the sector. Or if you think you’ve got the right stuff already, why not take a giant leap and make your own rocket, like the students who built Traveler IV. You might have to scale it up a bit though.
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Gap Year in Space: Gallery
The successful student team from the University of Southern California Rocket Propulsion Laboratory ©USCRPL
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