Price of proposed moon excursions set at $750,000

Grace Leong

Friday, Oct. 22, 1999 | 11:10 a.m.

The planned price for a ticket to the moon and back on Las Vegas hotel and real estate tycoon Robert Bigelow's 100-passenger luxury tourist cruise ship is now $750,000.

That figure is based on what his company, Bigelow Aerospace Co., estimates wealthy people would pay for a vacation. The company's mission is to maximize the passengers' enjoyment of the space flight experience in comfort and style at what it calls an affordable market price.

"At $750,000 a ticket, we're not going to be doing many expedition-type trips. We're going to provide on-board facilities that fit the price of the trip," Gregory Bennett, Bigelow Aerospace's vice president of spacecraft development, said at a seminar Thursday at UNLV's mechanical engineering department.

The $750,000 cost is higher than that estimated in July, when Bigelow said tickets may cost $350,000 to $700,000. Further revisions are likely as the technology is developed to launch the space tourism program.

Bigelow's half-mile long ship would accommodate 100 passengers and 50 crew and would spin to create gravity. The ship would permanently orbit the moon and passengers would be ferried to it from earth aboard smaller ships. Its parts would be built on earth and then assembled in space.

Bennett revealed an artistic rendering of the project's blue prints, with the zero-gravity hub located at the heart of the 2 million ton cruise ship, booster launchers emanating from above and below the zero-gravity hub, and two passenger tunnels branching out horizontally from either side of the hub.

The biggest challenge facing the space tourism project is whether the commercial rocket launching industry can provide lower-cost fully reusable launch vehicles for freight and passengers and whether there are any launch vehicles that can safely carry both human and nonhuman payloads to space and back.

"This is not a philanthropic venture. Bigelow is prepared, but of course not wanting, to go for 15 years at zero revenues for this project, which is a lot scarier than zero profits," Bennett said.

Bigelow, who owns the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, has a passionate interest in parapsychology and cosmic consciousness and funds UNLV's Consciousness Studies program, which studies the paranormal. He also funds research on unexplained cattle mutilations by the Nevada-based National Institute of Discovery Science.

Bigelow Aerospace's headquarters at 4195 west Teco Avenue is scheduled to open around May 2001 and the fledgling company now has 15 full-time employees including space engineers, mechanical engineers and industrial designers and has no immediate plans as yet to add on new workers. Bigelow has vowed to invest $500 million in the project.

"The biggest problem we're facing now is fuel and the cost of refueling. The converter space rocket engines we're planning to use would need to burn at least nine million pounds of fuel for every trip to the moon," he said. "It costs about $2,000 a pound to put heavy lift cargo into orbit currently."

For the cruise ship construction project to be cost-effective, launch costs must fall to about $550 per pound, he said.

"But even if costs fall to $550 per pound, with nine million pounds of fuel needed to launch the ship from earth to the moon, it doesn't look like a sustainable program ... unless fuel requirements can be knocked down to 54,000 pounds," Bennett said.

Among the alternatives considered for reducing fuel consumption are developing cheap fuel resources on the moon or using rockets that don't need a lot of fuel.

Apart from facing challenging safety and engineering problems, Bennett also expressed concerns about eliminating or minimizing physiological problems including "Space Adaptation Syndrome" -- nausea, dizziness and even unconsciousness.

There are also psychological problems such as feelings of isolation, fear and claustrophobia.

"Everyone experiences some symptoms of Space Adaptation Syndrome such as disorientation, nausea or worse, which could last at least three days or longer. But spin gravity may solve this problem," Bennett said. "We still need more empirical data on human responses to a rotating environment."

Bennett said the ship not only requires massive amounts of shielding to absorb radiation in space, but the project also has to meet NASA administrator Dan Goldin's stipulation that there shall be no fatalities in 999,999 hours of flight operation.

"The radiation is not so much a problem for the passengers as it is for the crew who are doing this continuously. If the ship is unshielded from radiation, a solar storm could easily kill all the passengers," he said.