January 06, 2011
KLM to Outer Space
After Richard Branson’s Virgin, the Dutch airline KLM has announced to offer space trips for ‘normal people’. Starting in 2014 the airline will offer this unique ‘life changing experience’ for a price of 70,000 euros, with a discount for regular KLM customers. The trips of only 40 minutes are made from the Space Experience Curaçao base (SXC).
A supersonic Lynx with space for two persons will rise to hundred kilometers altitude, where the occupants will experience weightlessness for about ten minutes before returning to Curaçao. At one hundred kilometers altitude the passenger is also not yet officially in space. The exosphere, where the earth’s atmosphere turns into the vacuum of space, starts at five hundred to one thousand kilometers and ends at about ten thousand kilometers.