There’s no missing the cover of this month’s issue of Aurora magazine. Aurora has found itself sketching out a place in future history books as it gears up to be the place where people first started riding commercial rocket ships into space and across the planet in the time it takes to pack for the trip.
Zoom.
This isn’t the first time folks have scoffed about high-speed travel. They laughed at Tony Jannus back in 1914. Jannus has the distinction of operating the country’s first scheduled passenger airline service, between St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida. At the time, it took two hours to make the trip between the two cities by steamship. By train, you had to commit anywhere from 5 to 12 hours. And by car? Two long days.
Jannus loaded up the former mayor of St. Pete and flew him the 20 miles across the bay in a breathtaking 23 minutes. Not impressed, civic leaders in those two destination cities didn’t see much future in commercializing quick trips across the bay. A little more than a decade later, commercial passenger airliners were under development. Within another decade, passengers were flying all over the world, complete with cocktails and pretty women to fluff passenger pillows.
About 100 years later, right here in Aurora, we’re getting ready to test the newest generations of airships, these models being called spaceships. Really. This time, backers have the keen interest of Aurora and state officials, who are helping fund million-dollar analyses of whether and how Front Range Airport might launch the world’s commercial passenger space business.
According to Aurora magazine writer Sara Castellanos’ story starting on Page 18, history repeats itself. It wasn’t the need to move so fast that drove the airline industry in the early days, it was humanity’s sense of adventure, invention and curiosity. The world didn’t need that kind of speed, it wanted it. Rocket engine and plane inventors are joining forces with investors and entrepreneurs to create hybrid rocket planes that takeoff like commercial jets, then fire rocket engines to push out of the atmosphere, moving across the planet in minutes, and then landing at special airports far, far away.
The idea is as far-fetched to some as was commercial flights to Europe was to people who lived here a century ago. And would you just look at what happened.