You’ve booked your seat on the spaceship and passed the medical — but what to wear for that flight into the final frontier?.
Orbital Outfitters has the answer. The new Los Angeles-based company on Thursday promised to dress the first space tourists and crew members in style.
”When someone puts on an IS3 [sub-orbital space suit], they will be protected by the best technology we can muster, yet they will look like they’ve stepped off the set of a science fiction movie,” said Orbital Outfitters president Rick Tumlinson.
”With billionaires funding the new space companies and passengers paying up to $200 000 for a ride, safety is important. We intend to also make it chic,” Tumlinson said.
Tumlinson said Orbital Outfitters planned to be on the leading edge of space suit fashion in a tourism industry expected to blast off around 2008.
It will deliver its first space suits in 2007 to crews of the California-based rocket powered vehicle company XCOR and then lease custom-fitted suits to the first mass space tourists.
Designs are still in the early stages but Tumlinson said the suits will have a Grand Prix or Nascar jumpsuit look to them and will bear the colors and logos of the rocket firm on which the passenger is flying.
Safety will be paramount and the suits will be made to protect passengers from extreme cold, a lack of air and atmospheric pressure and provide life-support functions for 30 minutes at 500 000 feet, or 152km high.
The cost of leasing the suit for one trip is expected to be from $3 000 to R6 000. – Reuters