With the support of NASA and after two days of training at Kennedy Space Center, Hurley-Moser is selling four-day space holidays featuring a three-hour suborbital trip about 75 miles above E arth, where passengers can experience weightlessness and all the pioneering pleasures of a space odyssey.
The voyages are offered by Virgin Galactic, a Richard Branson operation now accepting deposits for space holidays beginning in 2009, when it expects to schedule one flight a week for six passengers on a craft manned by two pilots. Passengers cannot be pregnant or under 18 years old, and they should be in reasonably good health. But otherwise almost anyone who can pay the $200,000 price can go, Hurley-Moser says.
One New Englander planning to take the ride is Steve LaVerdiere, who lives in Maine's Belgrade Lakes region. He owned a drug store chain, LaVerdiere's, that operated 72 stores in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont until he sold it to Rite Aid and retired in 1994.
For LaVerdiere, 57, finding out all he can about space travel has been "a lifetime hobby, my passion," he says. He still remembers a moment when he was 8 or 9 years old, "sitting on a dock at China Lake when an old duffer with a yellow sea plane asked if I'd like to go for a ride. Up in that plane, I couldn't believe it. Everything looked so different."
LaVerdiere began drawing planes and rockets and studying how they work. He devoured tales of the first astronauts. In the 1950s and '60s, he says, "astronauts were our American idols. They were my heroes even before they flew."
He yearned to be an Air Force pilot. But his poor vision nixed that dream, so he became a pharmacist instead. Until recently, he never thought he could be an astronaut. "I thought space flight was like a secret celestial Garden of Eden that just a few had seen," he says. "It was off-limits except to people with years of training, operating in programs under government control."
