Secular Pilgrimage (Personality Cult)

In modern usage, the terms pilgrim and pilgrimage can also have a somewhat devalued meaning as they are often applied in a secular context. For example, fans of Elvis Presley may choose to visit his home, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee.

In a number of Communist countries, secular pilgrimages were established as an "antidote" to religious pilgrimages, the most famous of which are:

· USSR: Mausoleum of Lenin in Red Square, Moscow;

· PRC: Mausoleum of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing;

· Germany: Birthplace of Karl Marx, Trier;

· Italy: Mausoleum of Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini, Predappio.

Space tourism is the recent phenomenon of tourists paying for flights into space pioneered by Russia.

As of 2009, orbital space tourism opportunities are limited and expensive, with only the Russian Space Agency (ISS) providing transport. The price for a flight brokered by Space Adventures to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft is $20–28 million.

Infrastructure for a suborbital space tourism industry is being developed through the construction of spaceports in numerous locations, including California, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Florida, Virginia, Alaska, Wisconsin, Esrange in Sweden as well as the United Arab Emirates.

With the realities of the post-Perestroika economy in Russia, its space industry was especially starved for cash. The Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) offered to pay for one of its reporters to fly on a mission. For $28 million, Toyohiro Akiyama was flown in 1990 to Mir with the eighth crew and returned a week later with the seventh crew. Akiyama gave a daily TV broadcast from orbit and also performed scientific experiments for Russian and Japanese companies. However, since the cost of the flight was paid by his employer, Akiyama could be considered a business traveler rather than a tourist.

At the end of the 1990s, MirCorp, a private venture by then in charge of the space station, began seeking potential space tourists to visit Mir in order to offset some of its maintenance costs. On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito, an American businessman, became the first "fee-paying" space tourist when he visited the International Space Station (ISS) for seven days. He was followed in 2002 by South African computer millionaire Mark Shuttleworth. The third was Gregory Olsen in 2005, who was trained as a scientist and whose company produced specialist high-sensitivity cameras. Olsen planned to use his time on the ISS to conduct a number of experiments, in part to test his company's products. They paid in excess of USD 20 million each.

More affordable suborbital space tourism is viewed as a money-making proposition by several other companies, including Space Adventures, Virgin Galactic, Starchaser, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR Aerospace, Rocketplane Limited, the European "Project Enterprise", and others. Most are proposing vehicles that make suborbital flights peaking at an altitude of 100-160 kilometers. This goes beyond the internationally defined boundary between Earth and space of 100 km. A citizen astronaut will only require three days of training before spaceflight. Spaceflights will last 2.5 hours and carry 6 passengers. Passengers will experience three to six minutes of weightlessness, a view of a twinkle-free starfield, and a vista of the curved Earth below. Projected costs are expected to be about $200,000 per passenger. Virgin Galactic had already pre-sold nearly 200 seats for their suborbital space tourism flights.

Поиск по сайту: