The Return of Romance in the New Frontier

When I first started flying in the sixties, it was very romantic. We wore suits and ties, and I flew on the Concorde from London to New York in three hours and fifteen minutes, going 1,300 miles an hour, sipping on a Grand Cru Montevarchi and nibbling on lobster claws and beef tips. Now that - that’s a ride.

-Syd Mead, visual futurist

Not everyone can fly with such luxury as Syd Mead, but few will argue that the sixties offered an incomparable experience in traveling. One did not need lobster claws and beef tips for a romantic travel experience; it came from the excitement in the idea of traveling. Today, however, offers a different story in air travel. Flying today is old. The idea is commonplace. Even with an excess of time and money, nothing in air travel could ever match the elegance and luxury of before. The experience of air travel has been designed to deliberately optimize the routine and ordinary, dismissing any sense of newness or awe. In other words, it lacks the romance of a newfound love.

There is, however, an opportunity to find new love with space. With suborbital travel, spacecraft, not airplanes, leave our planet's atmosphere and travel at speeds an order of magnitude above planes. At present, suborbital travel is used for space tourism and scientific experimentation, where spacecraft launch the willing and able-walleted into space to experience the awe and science of space itself. But suborbital travel has much more potential.

With a recently restructured NASA and privatized space industry, many companies have jumped at the opportunity of venturing into the suborbital frontier. “It’s an exciting time right now,” says George Whitesides, CEO & President of Virgin Galactic. “We’re right at the cusp of this fundamental shift in space transportation. What we aspire to do is orbital space flight, even point-to-point space flight. So that instead of just going straight up and straight down, you take off in Los Angeles and you go to Sydney, Australia in an hour.”

Imagine then, suborbital travel providing the means to design a new reality, where the world has become smaller and people from across continents can be connected by only a few hours. Business travelers from New York could rush to Hong Kong for that last-minute conference. Honeymooners could book a flight from London to Hawaii and start their excitement with the flight itself. A family in Los Angeles could travel to Tokyo and meet their grandfather one last time.  

Where does design come into play? Design has the power to familiarize the unfamiliar and help guide and inform new experiences. Design’s role in suborbital travel is therefore of paramount importance, as there is nothing more new than a future touched by the frontier of space. Design will be there when we thrust ourselves into the newness of space and leave Earth for the very first time. Design will be there when we are captivated by seeing our familiar planet in such an unfamiliar light. It will be there as we try to comprehend a dinner in Sidney after just having lunch in Los Angeles.

Designers of the future will become experts in interactions in the absence of gravity; they will be part of a new field defined by innovation. And since suborbital flight is a burgeoning frontier uninhibited by the politics and regulations of the airline industry, there will be true opportunities to design seamless, human-centered experiences that celebrate the achievement of venturing into space. The sixties may have offered an incomparable experience in air travel, but new love can be kindled as we take part in this new frontier. 

Romance has hope.