It took John Criswick less than a week to make his decision. It was something he had always wanted to do, ever since his parents bought him a telescope when he was 10. Never mind that it cost $200,000 to get there. He wanted to bring some adventure back into his life.
He would go to space.
"I like to have a little bit of risk and not be able to predict what's going to happen," said the 43-year-old CEO of Magmic Games, an Ottawa-based company that publishes and develops games for cellphones and BlackBerrys. "It's not just about the launch. A bunch of things are going to happen to me between now and then because of it."
Criswick is one of four Canadians who have signed up for Virgin Galactic's trips to space, slated to start in late 2009 or early 2010. Worldwide, almost 200 people in 30 countries have signed up for the 2½-hour trip to the final frontier.
To promote this nascent industry in Canada, Virgin Galactic has appointed five Canadian travel consultants who will act as sales representatives for the London-based arm of the Virgin Group of companies. Last week, Virgin's head of astronaut sales, Carolyn Wincer, trained the "accredited space agents" in Vancouver and visited them in their respective cities.
"It's a unique product to sell and one that's quite complicated, with a lot of unusual questions and one that not a lot of people know about," she said from the company's Toronto office.
Right now, it seems Virgin will take anyone willing to slap down a $20,000 (all figures U.S.) refundable deposit for the trip. There are no prerequisites other than "good health and reasonable fitness."
"The problem is that until now, nobody's monitored normal, everyday people undergoing G-forces," Wincer said. "The only people that are monitored are people training to be fighter pilots, and they are already trained to be in peak condition.
"So we hope to know more very soon ... but having said that, the G-force profile is nowhere near what fighter pilots and astronauts going to the moon have had to undergo. It should be fairly okay."
Travellers will experience a maximum of 3.5 Gs during their brief sojourn to space, Wincer said. Fighter pilots regularly experience about nine Gs, and even intense roller coasters can generate five.
This fall, Virgin will be sending the first 100 customers to human centrifuge training in Philadelphia, where specialists will test their ability to withstand G-force pressures, which can cause blackouts and even redouts, in which capillaries in the eyes burst.
"After those first 100, the goal is that they can just turn up a few days before a flight and do it," Wincer said.
Make space travel simple: That's what British billionaire Richard Branson, the Virgin Group's founder, had in mind when he partnered with Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer who designed the company's spacecraft, SpaceShipOne.
The vehicle was the winner of the $10-million Ansari X Prize, a competition for the first reusable, non-government, manned spacecraft.
Virgin will take its travellers on a brief, sub-orbital flight that reaches its peak 110 kilometres above Earth. They won't go fast enough to go into orbit, so the trip is essentially like throwing a gigantic ball into a parabolic arc and having it float safely to the ground.
The travellers will undergo a medical assessment six months before their flight. Wincer said they fly at their own risk and go through a process of "informed consent" before signing a waiver.
"At each stage, we advise what we know and what we don't know, and likewise the passenger has to advise the same thing," she said.
After two days of psychological, safety and G-force training, a mother ship will take the travellers' spaceship on a 40-minute flight to an altitude of 15,240 metres (the cruising altitude of the now-retired Concorde jet) and then release it.
