Watch this space tourism

America?s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) always thinks ahead. So what if its latest idea comes a few years after terrorists used a civilian airborne craft as a missile with deadly effect.

America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) always thinks ahead. So what if its latest idea comes a few years after terrorists used a civilian airborne craft as a missile with deadly effect. The FAA has proposed that space tourists — basically a super-rich lot tired of holidaying on the same Greek island, staying at the same Sienese villa, partying in the same Gdansk resort — will have to be screened that they aren’t terrorists. Just when Denis Tito, the first civilian to go where no civilian had gone before, was thinking of repeating his 2001 journey, he and his ilk will now have to go through the same hoi polloi motions of opening their alligator skin Louis Vuitton bags to deposit that nail-cutter weapon that was caught in the x-ray machine.

HT Image

If ratified, the FFA proposals will slightly upset Richard Branson, whose plans with Virgin Galactic — an operation that will catapult passengers into space from a launchpad in New Mexico — are set for lift-off by the end of the decade. After all, Sir Richard wasn’t expecting his clientele to be screened or, for that matter, cavity-searched.

But why will terrorists want to go to space in the first place? Well, all things that go up must come down, and hijacking a Boeing and crashing it into a building is a ripple compared to hijacking a spacecraft and banging it ‘down there’. So while the FFA thinks of stopping could-be space fidayeens, why doesn’t someone go a bit further than just beyond the exosphere and go to the Moon? One never knows, but the elusive WMDs just could be there somewhere.