Extreme tourism exploits, from Earth’s tallest peaks to suborbital space

SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft which launched in Texas in April this year. — Reuters

The US$250,000-a-head (RM1.16mil) expedition featuring a submersible that vanished recently – and then found on June 23, with no survivors – en route to the deep-sea wreck of the Titanic ocean liner is one example of extreme tourism that is becoming more commonplace for those who can afford it.

From Earth’s tallest peaks to suborbital space, here are some of the other exploits:

SPACE TRAVEL

A three-way competition between billionaire entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson has spurred the development of a nascent astro-tourism industry. Branson’s Virgin Galactic Holdings said recently that its first commercial spaceflight, called “Galactic 01”, would launch between June 27 and June 30.

The company has a reported backlog of 800 customers for the roughly 90-minute up-and-back flights, most of whom have paid between US$250,000 and US$400,000 (RM1.86mil) for their tickets.

Since June 2021, when the first seat was sold for US$28mil (RM130.2mil), Bezos’s space tourism venture Blue Origin has offered 10-minute flights to an altitude of about 100km, where passengers experience a few moments of weightlessness before descending back to Earth.

A Japanese billionaire has already bought every seat on the maiden voyage of Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket, which is intended to spend three days circling the moon and come within 200km of the lunar surface. Initially scheduled for 2023, the flight has been delayed by failed tests of the vehicle.

A hot air balloon during the Midlands Air Festival in Birmingham, England recently. Richard Branson once crossed the Pacific Ocean in one of these vessels. — AFP

EARTH-BOUND EXPEDITIONS

Meanwhile, on Earth, rich tourists disinclined to make gruelling treks through some of the planet’s toughest terrain can fly overhead or book private helicopters instead.

Before he set his sights on space, Branson was one of an elite group of extreme hot-air balloon travellers, becoming the first to traverse the Pacific Ocean in a balloon in 1991. Other wealthy individuals have set more distance, height, and duration records in the past few decades.

Heli-skiing services have launched in the snowy Himalayan mountains of Indian Kashmir, between India and Pakistan, during lulls in violence between Muslim separatists and the New Delhi government.

Mount Roraima, a mystic, flat-topped mountain on the Venezuela-Brazil border that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 The Lost World novel and was once only accessible to the Pemon indigenous people, now attracts thousands of hikers each year – and a few visitors who arrive at the top via helicopter. – Reuters