Barcelona-based Galactic Suite Ltd is currently building a small, orbiting hotel, which they claim will be open for business in 2012 (a timeline many people doubt). The initial hotel will be a single pod that can house four guests and two astronaut pilots, and will orbit 450 km above the Earth. The current pricetag is three million euros for a three-day stay, but that includes more than transit and a place to rest your weightless head. Guests will also spend eight weeks on a tropical island training for their vacation missions.

Once aboard the pod, guests will travel around the world once every 80 minutes and watch the sun rise and set 15 times a day. And, if they get sick of floating around the pod, guests will be wearing Velcro suits that will allow them to crawl along the walls.

So who is funding all this extraterrestrial fun? It sounds vaguely supervillainous, but Galactic Suite would only say that an anonymous billionaire had funded the project to the tune of $3 billion.

Space hotel says it's on schedule to open in 2012 [Yahoo! News via Reddit]

One of the current barriers to orbital skydiving is protecting the diver from the extreme heat of reentering the Earth's atmosphere. But NASA may have developed a solution in the form of the Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment. The IRVE is vacuum-packaged around a cylinder of gas, so it can be quickly inflated and deployed upon reentry. In NASA's test, the IRVE successfully resisted the heat of reentry at subsonic speeds.

NASA is developing the shield in hopes of using it in a future Mars mission, but it may have applications right here on Earth. The company Orbital Outfitters is exploring technologies that would make regular orbital dives feasible. Their plan is to bust Colonel Joe Kittinger's record 102,800 ft jump and to make a habit of it, allowing wealthy thrill-seekers to plummet to Earth from space. You will still, of course, have to check your fall plan to ensure there are no giant drills in your trajectory.

Orbital skydives to follow inflatable heatshield success? [The Register via Metafilter]

Writing in Britain's Guardian newspaper, Virgin Galactic's president Will Whitehorn attempts to explain why the company will be more environmentally friendly than you may have thought - if, of course, you'd considered the environmental impact of their plans at all:

The company is developing a 21st-century space launch system based on the principles of an entirely carbon composite construction, a unique benign hybrid rocket motor, biofuels where permissible and very high-altitude air launch and firing of the benign rocket rather than launching it from the ground.

The air launch negates the need to use dirty carbon-intensive solid chemical fuelled rocket boosters. The result is a very low-energy and low environmental impact approach to getting humans, scientific payload and eventually even small satellites into space.

The reason for this? Cost... and, it seems, the desire to revolutionize spaceflight in general on your dime:

We are not going to find better ways to get to space unless we can regularise space flight and this system will use space tourism as one means to lower the cost of space access... The highly efficient human and payload space launch systems will lead to an overdue industrial revolution in space. The alternative would be government funding of these new, less polluting systems – which is not an idea one can anticipate any public enthusiasm for.

Well, at least it's not your tax dollars at work...

Virgin Galactic: 'Getting into space has a very low environmental impact' [Guardian.co.uk]

Though Virgin Galactic is the best-known of the commercial space ships, many other companies like XCOR are getting in on the action. And Orbital Outfitters is banking on the idea that they'll want nifty-looking spacesuits for their passengers — not just to keep them safe, but also as souvenirs of their trip. Unlike the spacesuits that other astronauts wear, these suits won't be designed to help somebody walk on the moon. They just have to remain pressurized in the event of an accident. And as the Gilman knows, they also have to look cool. I don't know if I'd trust one of these suits in space, but I'd definitely wear it on the ground.

Hollywood Monster Maker Designs Suits for Travel in Space [via Bloomberg]

On Monday, Virgin Galactic's Branson and designer Burt Rutan gave the public our first peek at the Virgin Mothership — White Knight Two, an aircraft with a 43-meter wingspan and four Pratt & Whitney PW308 turbofans. It's gorgeous, it's gigantic, and it's going to carry Rutan's not-yet-completed aircraft SpaceShipTwo and six passengers (per flight) if all goes well. In fact, it's the first built of two planned White Knight Twos: This one is called "VMS [Virgin Mothership] Eve," after both Branson's mother and the Biblical pioneer of humanity.

As this BBC news graphic shows, the plan is for White Knight Two "Eve" to carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 15,000 meters, where SpaceShipTwo will then disembark and fire its engines for the biggest stage of the journey. It has to go up to at least 100,000 meters to break the Kármán line, or the official boundary of space according to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. Virgin Galactic's flight plans have it at 110,000 meters.

Near the top of the curve — specifically, after SpaceShipTwo's engines shut off and as it coasts to the highest point in its trajectory — passengers will experience weightlessness for a sustained six minutes. This explains the price hike to $200,000; six straight minutes is a bit more than you'd get out of a $3,675 parabolic flight with the Zero Gravity Corporation. After that, as they say, it's all downhill.

On Virgin Galactic's website, passengers (read: people who can afford to make deposits over $20,000) are described as astronauts. But the thing is, they're not exactly; in my view, astronauts are chosen for the value of their skills and expertise, and they're either wild daredevils or bewildered victims. Virgin Galactic's customers will be the first visitors to space who are tourists — not astronauts. So it's fitting, now that Branson estimates a maiden voyage in 18 months, for us to take a nostalgic look back at the first ever astronauts to cross the Kármán line.

The first living Earth creatures in space were a couple of fruit flies, who coasted past that 100-km boundary in a V-2 rocket in 1947. If that doesn't count for you, Albert II the Rhesus monkey went up on June 14, 1949 — also in a V-2 rocket. It didn't work out very well for him, though, as his parachute failed and he perished on impact. In 1950, the United States launched mice into space with V-2s; in 1951, the Soviet Union raised the stakes and sent two dogs up in an R-1. Both survived.

Several more Soviet dogs and American mice made the journey past the boundary of space in the 1950s, but the next first explorer was Laika, a stray dog who went from sniffing dumpsters in Moscow to being a canine cosmonaut. Laika went farther than any of Virgin Galactic's tourists will go on SpaceShipTwo; on November 3, 1957, inside Sputnik 2, she completed a full orbit of the Earth. (Yup, that's right — the first Earthling to orbit the planet had two X chromosomes.) She probably didn't finish many more, however, because the spacecraft cabin's thermal control system malfunctioned and she died about five hours into the flight. Laika's story is tragic, but it gets worse: Soviet engineers did not design Sputnik 2 to be retrievable. Nobody expected her to get back to Earth alive.

Life was kinder to Ham the chimp, a primate from Cameroon who found his way to the US Air Force and eventually into a Mercury capsule on top of a Redstone rocket. His suborbital spaceflight took place on January 31, 1961, and he emerged from splashdown with only a bruised nose to show for it.

That April, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in known history to orbit the Earth. He had spent his adolescence building and flying small-scale unmanned aircraft, and entered military flight school in 1955. After five years in the Soviet Air Force and another year of rigorous training in the space program, he was selected for this historic honor.

In December 2009, according to Branson, he and his family will become the first in known history to enter space — having paid for it themselves. After them come William Shatner, Signourney Weaver, Stephen Hawking, and ... Paris Hilton. Yeah, space tourism is beginning. One must wonder where it will take us.

Images from The Huffington Post, BBC News, WIRED Magazine, Wikipedia.

We love a good science fiction story, but sometimes reality is just as strange. While we may have seen 2001 come and go without an actual space odyssey, the last eight years have been full of events that - had they not actually happened - could easily pass for science fiction. Here are five real life events that still seem like they've come straight from the set-up of a big budget summer blockbuster.

Estonian Cyberwar: It may not have been the biggest cyber attack ever, but it's probably the strangest. Last year, Russian hackers got so ticked off when the tiny nation of Estonia digs up the remains of Soviet war heroes that they shut down Estonian newspapers, banks, and practically the entire government by using denial of service attacks on a huge scale. It's still unknown whether the culprits had help from the Kremlin as some have suggested, but given Russia's staggeringly large population of hackers it's not impossible that the crippling shutdown of an entire country was perpetrated by independent citizens. And you thought Live Free Or Die Hard was far-fetched.

CERN: You need only look at pictures from inside the Large Hadron Collider to realize the incredible, science fictional scale of the apparatus. The story of this machine has all the makings of a hard SF story: particles accelerating to truly dangerous energies as they swoop under the border of France and Switzerland, scientists eager to confirm their various theories and discover new, ever more ephemeral particles, and of course the ever present worries that the European research organization’s experiments will blow up the world! All we need to complete the set-up is some rogue scientist who plans to use the invention to hold the world to ransom and a sexy spy out to stop them.

Space Tourism: Movies and television have long promised that space travel will eventually be available to private citizens, but the real-life development of space tourism had been agonizingly slow until recently. Now, however, aspiring astronauts can book a weeklong stay at the International Space Station for around $20 million, or take advantage of offers to shoot you around the moon for a mere $100 million. Plus, it always helps to have an eccentric billionaire like Sir Richard Branson in the mix. Maybe he can work on bringing the price down for those of us who don't have a few million lying around.

SARS, bird flu, and the other near-pandemics: Outbreaks of crazy viruses have long been an SF favorite, and even though this century has conspicuously zombie-free - so far - we have had some pretty worrying scares. It isn’t hard to imagine race-the-clock medical thrillers hidden amongst the investigations, all those mysterious men in yellow hazmat suits, the mass slaughtering of potentially infected poultry, et al. We just see the headlines, of course; there could be dozens of extraordinarily science fictional stories hidden in the 21st century, and we might never know. Who's to say that A&E's The Andromeda Strain wasn't just a particularly well-lit documentary?

9/11: Yes, I know, but hear me out: Though the reality of it is all to apparent now, before 2001 the idea of nineteen guys armed with little more than box cutters and a plan causing so much destruction and changing the world so easily would have seemed a bit unbelievable even as the stuff of Hollywood. Science fiction tends to imagine and speculate about things that have never happened before, changes the world has never seen. 9/11 was, for most of us, precisely that sort of unexpected in the most horrific way possible.

The new system will be "hundreds of times" safer than current space travel, says Rutan. That will bring it up to the safety standards of commercial air travel in the 1920s. "Don't believe anyone who tells you that the safety level of new spaceships will be as safe as the modern airliner," he adds. His company already lost three engineers in an explosion during a "cold" test of the nitrous system last summer. [NYTimes, via Mark Pritchard]

Wanna get married on a different planet? Here are some bridal trains that won't trip you up in zero-g.

These designs are perfect for those going on the interplanetary party ship.

Rocketplane's holding competitions in the US and Europe starting next year, so stay tuned for some more space age-y designs. Images courtesy of Chuck Lauer