![]() space agency NASA announced in June that it plans to allow two private citizens a year to stay at the ISS at a cost of about $35,000 per night for up to a month. Since then, companies like Boeing, SpaceX and Blue Origin have been working on ways to bring the stars into reach for more people - opening up a new business frontier for would-be space hoteliers. multimillionaire Dennis Tito became the world’s first paying space tourist in 2001, traveling to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket for a reported $20 million. “But that’s the nature of these things, it sounds crazy until it is normal.” aerospace firm Orion Span, one of the companies vying to take travelers out of this world. “It sounds kind of crazy to us today because it is not a reality yet,” said Frank Bunger, founder of U.S. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.TBILISI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Tired of your ordinary earthly vacations? Some day soon you might be able to board a rocket and get a room with a view - of the whole planet - from a hotel in space.Īt least, that is the sales pitch of several companies racing to become the first to host guests in orbit on purpose-built space stations. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “The Essential List”. Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. * The documentary Hey Sisters Sew Sisters is on BBC World Service 31 December at 1130 and 5 January at 2000 GMT. These “sew sisters” are finally getting recognition for their work. If the material is too thick, we have to sew by hand.” “We use big long-armed sewing machines and, if there are places which we can’t reach, we sew by hand. Mayer’s handiwork helps protect the spacecraft’s instruments from temperatures up to 450C (842F). “It’s more interesting to produce something more technical so I sew insulations for spacecraft.” “I was never really interested in the clothes,” she says. Mayer, a manufacturing and integration specialist for the aerospace company RUAG in Austria, began her career at fashion school. The training included learning how to read blueprints, working with engineers and precision sewing using newly designed threads and multiple delicate layers of fine fabrics. Every time you sewed a seam, it had to be inspected, it had to be checked, because of the importance of what we were doing.” ![]() “And then I came to ILC to work on the Apollo spacesuits and everything was very slow. “That was production, so every thing was fast,” she says. The female astronauts who never saw space.“I’d just turned 19, so I was very young. Wilson’s sister told her about an opportunity to work on spacesuits for the new Apollo mission astronauts. The sturdy light, flexible materials designed for women’s undergarments turned out to be ideal for spacesuits too. “My sister worked at a company called Playtex, which at the time was associated with ILC Dover,” says Wilson. ( Learn 50 fascinating facts about the Apollo missions to the Moon.) Ten years later, in 1969, she was one of several seamstresses at ILC Dover who made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s spacesuits for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. By age nine, Wilson was designing and making dolls’ clothes. When Jeanne Wilson was seven, her mother taught her to sew. But there’s another activity far older than the history of human spaceflight, yet equally vital to today’s missions: the humble craft of sewing. These are the careers most often associated with space.
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