91av

THE trouble with being a space tourist is that there really isn’t very much
to do. The astronauts hog all the good stuff. They’ve got important experiments
to set up, mission control to chat with and a nice expensive vehicle to blast
about in. But what about us lesser mortals? All we would be trusted to do is
float about and look out of the window. And unique as that experience might be,
the novelty of it would soon wear off. Luckily, someone has already put some
thought into what we would actually do on a Club Med space holiday.

Reassuringly, the answer doesn’t involve Internet connections for playing
video games with Earthlings back home. Nor would it mean watching
three-dimensional space televisions, or star gazing. In space, it seems, the
best thing to do is forget about gadgetry altogether. Instead, slip off your
space suit and get yourself down to the nearest zero-gravity sports centre.

The idea of organised sports in space may sound a little mad, but one person
who’d disagree is Patrick Collins. In 1991, Collins left his post at the
management school of London’s Imperial College for a chair in economics at Azabu
University in Japan. Shortly afterwards he became involved in a study to assess
the viability of solar-powered satellites. His interest suitably fuelled, he
began to look at the financial feasibility of space tourism as a guest
researcher at NASDA, Japan’s National Space Development Agency in Tokyo.

A few years later in 1994, Daniel O’Neil at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, Alabama, compiled a report on tourism in space. “That
report concluded that not only were space hotels entirely feasible,” says
Collins, “but that tourism will become the biggest market in space.”

According to Collins, people are very keen to take a short break to an
orbiting hotel. “In surveys, most people say they’d like to go to space, and
that they’d be willing to pay several months’ salary to get there,” he says. He
suspects people’s willingness is partly down to a modern malaise. “People have
got more and more money, but less leisure time, so they don’t mind spending tons
of money, but they hate being stuck in a traffic jam,” he says. “When people
have got time off, they want to actually go and do something.” So why not spend
a week or two in a space hotel?

The word “hotel” might be stretching a point in the early days, says Collins.
“The first ones will be more like hostels than hotels,” he says. But building
them shouldn’t pose too many problems. “Essentially, you just need a safe tank
with lots of windows and a bar,” he muses.

One idea, by Space Island Group of California, is to assemble discarded fuel
tanks from shuttles into a ring-shaped hotel. The tanks are plenty big enough
for living quarters, says Space Island Group. Meanwhile, the Amsterdam-based
company MirCorp has leased the Russian Mir space station and plans to send its
first tourist, Dennis Tito, a former US space programme engineer, there next year
(91av, 8 July, p 40).
But once space hotels are up and
running, Collins says zero-gravity sports centres are a logical next step.

Working with the construction firm Hazama in Tokyo, Collins is already
drawing up basic plans for a zero-gravity sports centre. It will look rather
like a giant shiny football. Built from hexagonal and pentagonal alloy panels,
the pressurised sphere will have a diameter of 20 metres. And once the inner
wall has been lined, and heating and lights installed, Collins puts the total
mass at between 30 and 50 tonnes. Now all you need are a couple of mates and
you’re ready for some action.

“Just think of any sport—people on Earth will be wondering how you
could do it in space,” says Collins. And where better to start than with soccer,
the world’s favourite game? “In space football, you could use the walls to push
off from—that’d send you flying in a straight line into the opposition’s
half.” Making sharp turns might be a little trickier, though, admits Collins.
“But you could get your team-mates to push you off in other directions, or maybe
use floating medicine balls to push away from.” As fun as that might sound, to
some it’s just not football.

“I think it’d be a big yawn myself,” says Rogan Taylor, director of the
Football Research Unit at the University of Liverpool. “Once you get rid of
gravity, you can forget about it, it won’t be football.” Yet Taylor has
altogether grander ideas for football in space. “What would be more interesting
would be to find a bunch of creatures out there in space that play the game
under similar gravity to ourselves, so we could field an Earth Eleven,” he says.
“Just think, it’d be half French, you could have a couple of Africans and some
handy Brazilians. Everyone would just be shouting, ‘Come on Earth, get stuck
in’!” He admits that making it to away games might be a bit tricky, though.

One problem with zero-gravity football would be that if the goalie got in the
way of a shot that was on target, the force would propel him into the back of
the net. One way round this might be for the goalie to leap from the goalposts
towards an incoming shot, to overcome the ball’s momentum. Taylor, however, has
his own ideas. “You’d get the biggest human being you could find, and just park
them up in front of goal,” he says. That way, they might have time to throw the
ball back into play before they got knocked over the line with it. But what if
football’s not your thing?

According to Collins, there are plenty of other ways people could amuse
themselves in space. “You could put feathered wings on and fly about,” he says.
Aerobatics and dog-fighting could make great spectator sports, he says.

“Playing with water would also be fun,” says Collins. “You could make a
sphere of water and start blowing air into it—that’d make the skin of
water thinner and thinner,” he says. “You could then get it spinning like a big
pancake, pop the middle and go through it—you could have hours of fun.”
And perhaps you could. But not as much fun as you could have in a space swimming
pool.

Hazama’s plans for a space swimming pool take the form of a spinning
cylinder, 10 metres long and 20 metres across, that is part-filled with water
(see Diagram).
The cylinder’s rotation would force the water against the inner
wall, creating an air-filled cavity. The water would collect in a trough ringing
the inner wall, leaving an area dry to serve as the essential beach. Swimming in
low gravity could be strange though, says Collins. “You could push off the
bottom of the pool and jump out of the water and float about,” he says. “That’d
be mind-blowing.”

“I’d like to have a go at it,” says Helen Gorman of the Amateur Swimming
Association in Loughborough. “I wouldn’t go into space if I couldn’t go swimming
anyway,” she adds. But Ian McIntosh, secretary of the outdoor swimming club Ye
Amphibious Ancients’ Bathing Association in Dundee, isn’t so sure. “I don’t know
what to make of it. I couldn’t contemplate a thing like that.”

Contemplatable or not, Collins believes the incentive exists for space
tourism and eventually space sports. “Television rights alone could be worth a
fortune,” he says. But first, the aviation and space industries need to work out
who is going to do what, he says. And until then, it looks like playing around
in space will be left to those who do it best: the astronauts.FIG-mg22495301.JPG