Futuristic Technology

The Gift

The Gift is a futuristic story about a a little boy who takes a trip into space with his family at Christmas time. To them going on a space shuttle is not that big of a deal because everyone has been going on them, but they are excited it is their first time. They are going to take a trip to one of the planets.

In the story, the space shuttle is taking untrained people to space this was normal in their time. Now we really only take trained astronauts, but now there is a space shuttle that takes untrained people. This idea is new and everyone would love to go on this ship, but the problem is the cost which is 200,000 dollars. I feel this is a quite too costly. There would be two pilots and six passengers. The testing will start in 2008 and in 2009 be open for commercial service.

The technology in this book is similar to what we have now with the space shuttles. In the future possibly untrained people will be able to take "joy rides" in these space shuttles.
The question is will they really let anyone ride a space shuttle without any training?