Space hotel says it's on schedule to open in 2012

"Sylvia Else" wrote in message
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Jeff Findley wrote:
"Sylvia Else" wrote in message
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Three days?

If Virgin galactic's weightless experience is too short, I can't help
feeling that three days is too long. Once the novelty of microgravity
has worn off, you've seen umpteen sunrises, and looked at every visible
part of Earth from at least 450km away, boredom's going to set in.

Speak for yourself. I've flown many times and every time I fly I spend
every minute of the flight with my eyes glued to the window. The
exception is when the cloud cover is so dense you just can't see
*anything*. In LEO, the earth goes by fast enough that excessive cloud
cover shouldn't be a problem for more than several minutes. ;-)

There's a limit to how much you can see from that distance. It wouldn't be
like a real-life Google Earth.

With the naked eye, yes, but who said that tourists would be limited to the
naked eye? Have you seen some of the shots of the earth the ISS astronauts
have done with the hand held DSLR's that they've got up there? It's not as
high resolution as Google Earth (that takes huge telescopes), but you can
still get some pretty impressive shots with the lenses they're using. This
is exactly the sort of thing a space tourist could do and would easily
occupy days worth of time. A professional DSLR, big honking lens, and a
crap load of SDHC cards would be a fraction of the total cost for the trip.

Whenever I take a week long trip, I come back with maybe 1000 digital
pictures. On a "trip of a lifetime" like this, I'd expect that number would
be much higher, even if I'm limited to three days.

Jeff
--
"Take heart amid the deepening gloom
that your dog is finally getting enough cheese" - Deteriorata - National
Lampoon