New Hawaii venue: space tours?

HONOLULU — Space pioneers envision launching high-end Hawaii tourists from the sand to the stars, taking island-hopping to new heights.

Hawaii could become the first place where travelers can use rocket planes for real transportation. Planners envision planes taking off in one place, traveling through space, then landing in another, going from the Big Island to Oahu. Within a decade, space travelers could island hop from Hawaii to Japan in 45 minutes.

And promoters promise a unique perspective during the flight.

"Flying down the Hawaii island chain, it's a completely different view of the planet than you'll see when you launch from landlocked states," said Chuck Lauer, vice president of business development for Oklahoma City-based Rocketplane Global. "It's the 'blue planet' view of the world."

Hawaii's tourism leaders recognize the potential for attracting visitors with the promise of space travel, but it's unclear whether Gov. Linda Lingle will release the licensing money at a time when the state is facing big budget problems and possible government-employee layoffs. A new law authorizes the state to spend $500,000 to apply for a spaceport license from the federal government, which is the first step toward allowing commercial space travel from the islands.

If the plan goes forward, tourists would pay $200,000 for a weeklong package including spaceflight training, resort accommodations and short test flights to simulate weightlessness.

At the vacation's finale, five voyagers would embark on a horizontal takeoff aboard a special rocket plane, climb to 40,000 feet before rockets fire, accelerate to 3,500 miles per hour, coast for a few minutes of weightlessness 62 miles above the Earth, flip over and then return to ground.

Jim Crisafulli, the state's director of aerospace development, is confident many people would come to Hawaii to fly to space. "They wouldn't bat an eye at spending that amount of money to fly to space," he said. "It's going to be a soul-energizing experience."

Hawaii could become the eighth state granted a spaceport license. The process will take about three years, meaning spaceflights wouldn't start before 2012.

Hawaii would use existing runways on Oahu and the Big Island for its space program, which would use a rocket plane that looks like a midsize business jet. The plane is still in the design phase, with construction expected to begin in a year and a half in Burns Flat, Okla.

Several space-tourism companies, including Rocketplane, have shown interest in coming to Hawaii if they could, said John Strom, vice president of business development for Enterprise Honolulu, the Oahu economic-development board. Those businesses' studies show they could turn a tidy profit if the Hawaii market opens.

Space tourists will gain a different understanding of how fragile the Earth is, said Strom, a private pilot.

"The higher you go, the smaller it gets," he said. "You definitely get a sense of the uniqueness of this fragile blue marble that we live on."