Future is booking tickets to Space.

When I say booking tickets to space, the first name to strike your mind might be Elon Musk. Sorry to disappoint you, I am not even going to include his name in further sentences. Yes, you read it right. Apart from the advancement of SpaceX rockets and his lunar as well as Mars tourism endorsements, there's a lot of things to talk about in the Space Tourism commercialization front.

Starting from Yuri Gagarin's Vostok-1 launch to Christina Koch's longest stay in space, space travel has come a long way facing many crests and troughs. And now the bubbles of space tourism surfacing the public platforms are creating new peaks among the space enthusiasts. Space tourism is not new to this era. It has already been inaugurated and explored by the Russian Space Agency in the early 2000s. Dennis Titto, the first space tourist and an American entrepreneur bought the first-ever space travel ticket costing him a huge $20 million. In his 60th year, his childhood dream got fulfilled when he boarded a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space station in 2001 coordinated by Space Adventure Ltd. However, the RSA closed the space tourism program in 2010 even after executing many tourist missions due to an increase in the ISS crew size. From then onwards, many agencies and companies have been trying to successfully premier their space tourism endeavors.

Space travel is generally classified into three types. The first one is suborbital space travel, the second is orbital space travel and the last one is space travel beyond earth's orbit. Space tourism has pinned a lot of badges when it comes to suborbital space travel. But things are not that advanced in the other two segments. Many companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, Boeing, etc. are tightening their nuts and bolts to catapult tourists to the suborbital space. They have a promising portrayal of their plans for the near future. 

Space tourism can be executed successfully, based on discrete phases.

Phase-1 would be proper space transportation. In these recent years, there's a heap of research and development in building a spacecraft or space vehicle. Spacecrafts come in different shapes and sizes. Apart from single-stage space vehicles, the two-stage space vehicles require a launch vehicle to get them to space. Launch vehicles can be rockets or planes based on the level of altitude, design, mission objectives. Rockets use solid and liquid propellants undergoing internal combustion in a rocket engine whereas airplanes use conventional wings along with the air-fuel mixture as propellants. Launch vehicles are generally attached to two kinds of crewed spacecraft, i.e. space capsules and space planes, for carrying human crew to space. 

Space capsules being very economical and simplistic in designs are being used widely in different manned space missions. Early space missions like the Vostok program and Apollo program mostly used capsules for human space transports(cosmonauts from Russia or astronauts from America). Capsules are carried by multistaged rockets and are mostly orbital and beyond orbital in kind. The launch sequence includes different stages of separation of the rocket launchers. This is where a huge chunk of money gets wasted when the rockets fall back to the earth and become of no use. 

SpaceX has done significant research in this field to reuse these separated rocket launchers (Falcon-9) by landing them properly back to the earth's crust. Falcon-9 is designed to take the 7 membered crew dragon reusable capsule to the orbit where it can latch onto a docking port in the ISS using a sophisticated automatic docking system. And at the same time, the falcon 9s can return back safely to earth. After completion of the mission, the crew Dragon capsule can detach from the station and reenter back to earth. Inturn a suite of parachutes can lower them gently to a known location in the ocean to be retrieved later by a SpaceX boat.

Similarly, Boeing is developing its own 7 membered crew capsule called the Boeing CST-100 Starliner which can be launched using multiple launch vehicles like the Atlas-V made by Lockheed Martin, Delta-4, Falcon-9, Vulcan Centaur, etc. The 100 in CST-100 is used in consideration of the Karman line (the virtual periphery of the earth's atmosphere). It promises to take at least 1 space tourist along with 5 astronauts under NASA's Commercial Crew Program.

 

Unlike SpaceX and Boeing, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin is developing a suborbital spacecraft with a fully reusable and Vertical Takeoff &Vertical Landing New Shepherd Propulsion Module carrying the New Shepard crew capsule. The crew capsule can take up to six members and can return from space using a parachute landing system while the propulsion module can get back safely once it ascends the crew module to suborbital space. Right now it is undergoing its testing phase.

Virgin Galactic is an American spaceflight company owned by the Virgin group, instead of capsules it uses spaceplanes named VSS Unity and the mid-air launching vehicle White knight to propel to suborbital space. The white Knight launcher as well as the VSS unity spaceplane are capable of doing traditional airplane landing in modified runways or sophisticated spaceports without any issue associated with capsule landing. These spaceplanes will be used in the earth-to-earth spaceflight as spaceliners boarding 6 passengers and 2 pilots. The system is in the developmental phase and can be used as the fastest transport in between developed cities.

SpaceX is also in the race for its own spaceliner using earth to earth Starship variant. Unlike supersonic jets, the single-stage hypersonic starship variant can travel up to 10,000 km at a speed of 25,000 Km/hr in between major cities of the Earth. The other multistage variants of starship are being developed to be used for moon and Mars missions. Floating super-heavy class spaceports will be used for all the starship variants making it a hub of suborbital, orbital, and beyond orbit space travel. 

Orion Span is a USA-based company working in the development of a space hotel. Space hotels are basically space stations in earth's orbit revolving around the earth. Space stations are huge spacecraft with a huge capability of orbiting the planet as well as housing many crew members in space for several years down the line. Orion span has proposed such a space station called Aurora space station which will offer a one-time gathering of 6 members (2 professional members and 4 tourists) in the low earth orbit. A long 12 days stay for $9.5 Million per tourist including nonspace food and drinks, recreational activities will definitely give a hair tinkering experience to the boarded tourists.  

Joint ventures in between (SpaceX and Axiom space), (Space adventure and SpaceX) are also boosting orbital space tourism programs. (Space Adventure and DSE Alpha) are also collectively working to execute a circumlunar mission to the moon with a price per passenger being $100,.000,000.

Phase-2 would be medical testing and basic training of a space tourist visiting space. It will be a tedious task to train the basic functioning and usage of spacecraft to a common space tourist. Spacecraft designers are required to rethink the interior design directly in interaction with the passengers.

Phase-3 would be the safety of the passengers inside the spacecraft. 

If these 3 phases can be carried out properly then the future of space tourism will be on the brighter side. With the commercialization and globalization of such services, one-day booking tickets to space might become cheaper than conventional flight tickets. 

Briefly saying, the future of space tourism is looking brighter than ever before. After privatizing the space exploration process, many big companies are putting a big chunk of their resources into the research and development of new modes of space transportation. In the 2020s we will be seeing the commercialization of suborbital space travel. It may so that we can buy a ticket to space just for recreation or it may be a hypersonic journey in a spaceliner to jump from one city to another. And there is a huge chance that orbital space exploration may boom. Perhaps there might be some space hotels (space stations basically) where we can book a 2 nights, 3days holiday (Although there won't be nights or days as it is in the earth's crust). The late 2020s might also gift us the endeavor to go beyond the earth's orbit. Lunar tourism is one of the big things endorsed by Musk in these recent years. Eventually, we can be interplanetary species after completing a mission to mars and the followingly ascending towards the mars tourism programs. In the coming 50 years or so, we can definitely see some huge leaps to different space boundaries. Habitation and colonization at different planets and natural satellites may become real too.

References:

1. Articles from NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Boeing, etc.

2. Wikipedia

3. Science Direct

4. Revfine

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Don't count others' dollars, count your rupees.

Since today's world grasp the money language more efficiently, this is the best way to make you understand something mentioned below.

Don't compare your life with other's, it's not the right way. Life is wholesome of your deeds, your time you spent, your emotions you endured so when it comes to comparison then why compare it with others?

If you really want to compare something, then compare your deeds, your investments, your finances, the people you gathered with respect to your time. Compare your today's with your yesterday's and not of others or with others.

I see a few ads in which some websites help you to check your credit scores for free, i.e. your financial credit score. What it does is, it checks your payment history, current debt, length of credit and types of credit. All these are fed to a computer program with sets of algorithms to generate a score which helps you to get loans for future. While designing this program, the designers and developers might have thought something very basic but its vitality subdues invaluable teachings of life. The program is so written that it only compare your debt with your credits. It doesn't compare your transaction with others. If it would have been so then just imagine collating your credits with credits of Bill Gates. Your score would have been so minuscule that no banks would have ever given you a single penny.

If we take examples of banks, then the credit card they provide is their credits of tomorrow loaned to the consumer. The credit card is literally apt through the point of view of the banks but as far as we the consumers are concerned, it should be called a loan card. It's a subtle business strategy and advertisement secret laid by the banks to name it so. Since we find the word "credit" a positive word psychologically, we run and toil hard to get the card in our wallets but when we get the real meaning things get quite clear. Likewise, debit cards are the real credit cards for us and concurrently a debt from us to the bank. So, each one of us must have a debit card, whereas credit cards are the cards of risks we should take only if we like risky tasks.

Similarly, the life you are living is fully yours, other lives are there to experience it as like you are experiencing others'. The people who always contrast their lives with respect to others can't really find a purposeful and fulfilling life for themselves. What you are doing today should have a greater value than your actions of yesterday and what you are going to do tomorrow should have a greater value than your actions of today.

As a matter of fact, every one of us has got one life, not more than one at least with this body so why to live it meaninglessly and spoil such valuable time we are graced with. Let us utilize it the best way possible.

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Can we see the future?

If somebody asks me a question similar to that sort, then I would say with the current technology, yes.
But with the yes I would like to say, we would be needing a very delicate and accurate application or software to input such a big amount of information, process it and give the accurate output.

Nowadays there are applications which can predict the weather, the planetary locations, the traffic jams, the destructive earthquakes, and even the deadly Tsunami. But these are focused to a specialized algorithm and are set to determine a single type of issue occurring or going to occur in the coming future. We just need to build such an application which can create a simulated universe within itself taking in the past and real-time data to predict the future.

We know that satellites are present at different orbits constantly giving gigs of inputs to the crust civilization for research and development, maintenance of different systems, real-time information, updates and up-gradation to different apps and software etc. We also know that the Internet of Things IoT is a hot buzz in the current timeline. But all these current technologies with a few more modifications can be one day used to make such a medium which can predict the coming future.

With an ideal model, there are always errors circling which inhibit any system to achieve its idealistic state. Hence, there is nothing present which is 100% ideal. The ideal model is just an assumption with a few constants and variables. If at all we make the device or application which can predict the future, it will not be able to predict the 100% exact occurrence of the prediction in the real-time. Rather it may have an efficiency of certain percentage depending on the amount of input it is injected to.

Generally, with the power of approximation, our mind can process the past and real-time data to approximately predict the future. That is most often called intuition. The psychologists are going crazy to find the link between our mind and our actions which may give us a clue to deduce the codes to know the future. Our actions are due to the combination of the chemical reactions going in our mind. Our environment, diet, past actions, nearby interactions, climate all of it directly or indirectly contribute their bits. All these bits of information determines our mood and mode of action which is going to happen in the future time.

Neural links are something in the talks and are a very hot topic nowadays. Thus, more information from the neural links can be inserted to increase the efficiency to a higher level. Real-time assessment of our body can provide a much precise and accurate outcome of our future.

People in the financial, stockbroking business are already predicting the ups and downs in the stocks of the future. The stockbrokers have decoded certain trends, gathered many parameters, derived many formulas which can see the stocks of tomorrow. Asper their quotes, they have developed certain programs or software whatever you may call it which claims to predict a 90% accurate future of stocks of tomorrow. That's mind-boggling for us to know, and the people who do it earn in millions and billions. Certainly, something in this seeing the future business is guaranteed, i.e. a whole lot of credits in terms of money.

The basic design of the program/software/application can be set up following all the above algorithms. More and more precise input will have to be extracted to get the best output of the future. The only thing we should worry about is its application. On good hands, the usability will be for the good of the world and on bad hands, the earth might face its doomsday soon. To be continued...

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Entrepreneurs or Gods!!

1. India is the fastest growing economy this year, i.e. 2018 by 7.4% rate. India grew faster than China in 2014 to 2016 but lost its title in 2017 to China with a 5.6% rate due to demonetization. No worries, some economist claims it will give better growth rate in the coming years.

2. India will be the most populous nation with 1.44 billion people in 2024 approximated according to UN world population prospect 2017. With a strong demographic dividend, India will have more no of working aged people than nonworking aged ones. The median age is just 27.3, which means the average age of people in India is 27 approx.

3. Foreign investments are increasing but the domestic investment has fallen drastically. India's exports have dropped despite the efforts of "Make in India" campaign. This means that foreign companies are getting benefits by importing their products but the Indian companies due to flaws in import structure and lack of appreciation are not able to draw more benefits from the rest of the world.

4. India is witnessing a 1million labor force every month. That means within the span of 30 days a minimum of 10 lakh people is eligible to get jobs. This is the eligibility power of India which doesn't match the real working power that means the human resource is getting wasted due to no availability of work.

5. As per current status, 25 million (2.5 crores) people applied for less than 90,000 jobs in railways. This means for a single railway job there are 278 people (approx.) lining up for the fill. 200,000 people applied for 1137 post of havildars in Mumbai which says there are 176 people (approx.) for one post in Mumbai police. So, from these figures, we can imagine how much the quantity of jobs is needed to be created to reduce the unemployment rate.

6. Top rating agencies have cut the Indian growth projection because of higher import costs and higher inflation. Example: Oil prices. That means the goods and services price is rising and consequently, the purchasing power of the currency is falling.

7. The Indian rupee is the worst performing currency in Asia this year. As the value of the currency is falling the import charges are increasing and so as to balance the flow the revenues on which Indian budget is formed, is falling short to maintain the national economic growth.

Shortly, India is in a dangerous situation where it needs jobs, better nourishment to human resources, awareness to reduce population growth rate, more domestic investments, more export facilities, fewer imports, more budgets to improve R&D within the nation, entrepreneurs and at last a miracle from (36 crores + 20 approx.) Gods.

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Happiness: Just Do it!!

A teacher asked a set of questions in the class of randomly distributed specialized individuals. The question goes like this: “What is the most important thing in anybody’s life? Why we all do things like jobs, buy properties, get assets, increase bank balance etc.? What is the ultimate aim of life?”

Initially, the class was like a morgue, but after few ticks, few hands were raised. Some of them answered very positively “To become a successful person”, few murmured with dubiety “To fulfill all of my parent’s dreams along with mine”. And the meritorious pupil and scholars summarized the whole lot and put forth as the answer to the set.

But following dissatisfaction to all these dilemma-tic explanations, he asked one more set. “After fulfilling all these things; your dreams, your parent’s dreams, what will you get? What will be the outcome?”

The answers came like; “I will be famous, popular among my fellow mates, my family members. All will adore me, love me, remember me etc, etc”.

But the streak of dissatisfaction continued, and again with his interrogative mode on he asked “After all these name & fame, what will you get individually? Tell me in a single word.

And the single word came out to be the happiness which not only satisfied the question mark on the teacher’s forehead but also clarified the confusion of setting the ultimate goal among the whole class.

Happiness is the only prime concern for which everybody rolls many papads in their lives. We do everything, even excrete to become happy. 

We go for shopping, picnics, movies, parties, restaurants, tours, etc. generally to taste a small piece of the happiness cake. But if we glance in a more practical perspective the whole building of getting happiness will collapse down if we go on following these indirect methods. To grab happiness in our palms we need not go to huge malls, wear hefty and popular brands, travel to exotic locations etc. etc. But the baseline is very simple; Make others happy to get happiness to your court.

The most effortless way to get happiness is already known to all of us, but we don’t bother to follow it. We don’t like to touch our nose straight from the front, but we like to go around the head to get fingers on it.

If by just following a few tricks we can spread happiness then why not to implement it in our day to day life.

 If by giving a phone call to parting friends or family, we can make them happy then just ring them. Get a list done to whom you want to make happy and then do a call or message them.

If a small like, share or comment on somebody’s status can give them the most valuable curve on their face then just do it. It doesn’t even subtract a single penny form your account but spreads happiness among others.

If by giving a surprise gift or doing a surprise recharge in the cell phone of your admirer, friend, family or even foe cheers them up, bliss them jollity then just do it.

The best way to spend your first salary is to give it among the people who are in need & are sweating to earn their everyday seeds. Just bestow it and you will have an inner beatitude.

If you got a Diwali bonus then just buy some crackers for the kids who don’t have enough money to buy them. You will definitely feel good about your deeds. You will see yourself in a much higher position than Mr. Gates even though you get an average salary.

Just plant a tree and you will make nature happy and in return, it will make your generations happy.

Happiness is not just a one-way flow, it flows to both the ends and that is what makes it never ending.

Concluding with a beautiful note which reads; “ We waste our life on things, we think could buy happiness until we realize the only way to buy happiness is to give happiness”.

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