Dear Thursday: Up, Up, and Away … Someday

Photo Credit: NASA; Source: Gawker

This recently published picture of the Omega Centauri cluster taken by the refurbished Hubble scope reminded me of two things:

1. I need to make sure to hit observatories when I travel out of town. Living in a city with heavy light pollution is no fun for a star gazer. And…

2. I so want to see those stars for myself.

And of course those two thoughts got me to wondering whether the dream of space travel for commoners is dead. Growing up, I had always hoped that I would get to travel to the moon during my lifetime. Now I’ve pretty much given up on that happening. Though we fund NASA with our tax dollars, they don’t even seem to have space travel for commoners on their radar.

I keep hearing about these private companies that are supposedly working on space tourism, but I’ve been hearing about these companies for 15 years now and I’ve only seen millionaires go into space.

At this point, I’m not only worried that I won’t get my much-dreamed-about space vacation, but that Betty won’t either — unless she grows up to be a billionaire, but I don’t want to pressure her.

Maybe I’m just being impatient. Virgin Galatic says that their space flight program for almost-regulars ($200,000 to start, but they hope to eventually get it down to $20,000) might be ready as soon as June 2011. However, it’s hard to remain positive about that venture when as of this writing, I couldn’t get their website to load.

But what do you think? Are we going into space sooner than later or are we destined to live our entires lives stuck in this cage on this planet.