LATER this year, American millionaire Dennis Tito hopes to fly to the International Space Station on a Soyuz rocket, becoming the world’s first space tourist on a $20 million package holiday. But a revolutionary new way of fuelling a space shuttle could one day make such space tourism far cheaper-and even safe enough to fly from civilian airports.
The trick is to harvest liquid oxygen from the atmosphere. The proposed new fuelling system, called Alchemist, would allow a plane the size of a Boeing 777 to take off from a runway with an orbiter on its back. It would fly…
