2021 ushered in the birth of the space tourism industry in earnest. Just as we had grown accustomed to the commercialization of space by SpaceX’s Elon Musk, we have now also seen launches by Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, who managed to get paying passengers into space. With three competitors, the space tourism industry is now in a space race for tourism dollars. Unfortunately, space tourism exists today only for the very rich. With prices hovering around $250,000 per seat, space travel is not yet available to the average person. However, these high prices are unlikely to last in the future. Eventually competition and improvement in technology will bring the cost of space travel down to earth and space tourism will become a commodity available to the rest of us.
Can you imagine a world where space tourism is not only affordable for most people and vacations in space become commonplace? If you don’t think you’ll live long enough to experience that world, keep this in mind… it took a mere 66 years to go from the Wright brothers and Kitty Hawk to Neal Armstrong walking on the moon. Think of the changes the world saw during those 66 years. before the end of this century. Even if you don’t want to take a honeymoon cruise to the moon or live on a colony on Mars, your children and grandchildren probably do. Can you imagine that world? Jim Grebey did.
In his new book, Red Tide – Life on the Martian Frontier (Red Tide), Jim Grebey describes life at the end of the 21st century. It’s a life where space tourists board space-bound cruise ships to enjoy the thrill of floating in their staterooms while enjoying the benefits of weightlessness on their honeymoon. A cruise to the Moon allows tourists to take a shuttle to the town of Armstrong to visit the first LEM landing site or walk through glass tubes through Buzz Aldrin Crater National Park on the surface of the Moon. . It is also a time when 5,000 colonists live and work in the first Colony on Mars.
Red Tide tells the story of Myah, a 27-year-old marine biologist working for NASA on a grant to study marine life on the Great Barrier Reef. She enjoys her life in Australia, but is abruptly called to Florida to meet with her sponsor NASA, who wants to send a marine biologist to Mars as part of her team to search for past lives on the planet. She has chosen Myah for the mission and convinces her to return to Mars with him by showing her a piece of sediment from a sample taken from the Martian Frontier. Red Tide follows Myah’s journey, first on a cruise to Armstrong City and then on a transport headed for the mining colony on Mars. Myah believes the chunk of sediment she was shown may be a clue, providing further evidence that a vast ocean once existed on the surface of Mars. She is looking for real evidence to convince people that life once existed on the planet. She reluctantly agrees to go to Mars and discovers that the colony is much more advanced than the remote alien outpost she envisioned.
On Mars, Myah joins a team of scientists on an expedition to the Martian frontier, following geological clues that life may once have existed. The team survives the hostile Martian environment and discovers a hidden secret about the planet. Red Tide demonstrates that the basic nature of man, his need for love, adventure, and discovery, does not change even though humans are no longer tied to Earth. Human nature and potentially his survival is tied to his natural desire to explore the unknown. Red Tide answers fundamental questions like: Why do humans need to become a multi-planetary race?
Jim Grebey gave free rein to his imagination and created this vision of our universe at the end of the 21st century. What he envisioned is not a Jetsonian world, but a practical vision of life in the next 66 years. Be sure to put Red Tide on your holiday reading list. It can help you decide where to book your next cruise. Red Tide by Jim Grebey | Bookstore (bookbaby.com)