Imagine, boarding an aircraft, with a small Space-Shuttle attached to the back. The aircraft takes off, and you climb in a hatch, finding yourself to be in the space shuttle.

Impossible? Well, maybe in real life, but this was only and example. This appeared in the movie, Superman Returns. I have my own beliefs of how it should work. Though public space travel is already in business, not many people can afford it. Only rich people can go to space, due to a fee of $5 million. These people are paying to go to the International Space Station, or ISS. The cheapest way to go to space would most likely be to become an astronaut. Paid by your countries government, all you have to do is work a little. But not everyone is hired to become an astronaut.

Image via Wikipedia

If a public space travel vehicle is built, how will it be made profitable? Even a non-profit organization will have to be making more money than spent in order to pay employees. They would also need more materials for future flights. These are various problems faced in public space travel. One possible solution to this is build an elevator. Though Space-Elevators have already been built, they do not actually reach the exosphere. It would be improbable and nearly impossible to build what we think of an elevator all the way to a space station. What the plan is, to build a special strand of carbon arranged in a certain way so that it would form a cable, incredibly strong. The cable is then strung all the way to the Space Station. A motorized pod moves people up and down the cable,  and that is a probable way to do it. But there are many complications to this. The main one is, scientists so far can only make carbon cables a couple centimeters thick. Another is, how will the pod get enough power to continuously move up and down between Earth and Space? For the power, there has been a contest to think of a way to do this among adolescent teams. There have been several probable solutions, but these are not important at the moment.