2001: A Space Travel Insurance Odyssey
Only hours before the first launch of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket – a rocket which aims to make humans an ‘interplanetary species’ – US travel insurance comparison site AardvarkCompare announced that it would be offering a Space Travel Insurance product to all prospective astronauts.
Inventor and investor Elon Musk last year announced that he plans to develop spacecraft that will allow humans to populate Mars and would also allow commercial travel to anywhere on Earth in under an hour.
Although SpaceX Falcon Heavy departed on a test flight recently, the project will not be fully operational until 2022, according to Musk, and four aircraft will be operational and travelling to Mars by 2024.
AardvarkCompare might need that time however, as it is yet to work out pricing for its new product. CEO Jonathan Breeze said of the new product: “I had the privilege of meeting with the last man on the Moon, Gene Cernan. I genuinely believe that we will soon return to the Moon, as Gene hoped for in 1972. I am pretty certain that our older AARP travellers will be the ones that take those initial Space Voyages. The Boomers are our most adventurous of travellers, and we expect to see them in space, soon.”