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Introducing Shuttle: A Smartphone App for Booking Space Travel
Commercial space travel is by no means a mere pipe dream, as several companies around the world continue to push us towards a point where anyone with deep enough pockets can venture beyond planet earth.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX recently announced that a Japanese billionaire will be the first moon tourist who’ll fly into space aboard the company’s Big Flacon Rocket in 2023.
Now this intriguing field has taken a fresh turn with the launch of an online aggregating platform for booking a seat on spaceflights.
The platform is the brainchild of Shuttle, a web and mobile-based booking agent for spaceflight created by a 24-year-old entrepreneur named Avery Haskell. Shuttle was launched out of the Alchemist Accelerator and was co-founded with cybersecurity expert and Wickr co-founder Nico Sell.
“Space is my first love,” says Haskell. “I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut and help more people become astronauts. I thought it would be cool to get more people to go to space and get more people interested in space travel.”
The offerings on Shuttle will range from trips on Virgin Galactic costing upwards of $250,000 to more affordable packages that will include a zero-gravity flight on a modified Boeing 747 priced at just under $5,000 per seat.
“Our mission is to open space up to everyone,” Haskell added. “We want to get more people to space so that the price goes down and so that more people can see earth from space and become private astronauts.”
Shuttle will gradually add more packages on offer which will include bookings for space hotels. The company aims to become the hub that aggregates all commercial space travel related bookings.