The future of travel, or how science fiction is becoming science fact

Despite the recent climatic evidence, the summer is now in full swing. With that comes the associated spike in travel, with its all too frequent inconveniences and irritations. If you have ever spent hours waiting in an airport for your flight to take off, only to have to sprint to a gate, or seen all of your plans fall into chaos due to a missed connection, you will know exactly what I’m talking about.

After twenty plus years of jumping on planes and trains and into cars for work and leisure trips, I’m interested in how my journeys are going to change in the future. And in fact you don’t have to look very far to see how quickly science fiction is becoming science fact here.

Let’s start with space. Is it really the “final frontier”?

Not if SpaceX, Google’s Lunar XPRIZE or the Mars One mission have anything to do with it.

The Google and XPRIZE challenge is hunting for the engineers and entrepreneurs who are able to land a rover on the Moon, have it travel 500 metres and send back high definition video to Earth. The deadline to do it is the end of 2017 and the effort has to be privately funded. For anyone who has ever harboured a suspicion about the Apollo 11 landing, this could be a chance to deliver the real deal…

SpaceX, set up by Tesla’s Elon Musk, is also aiming to revolutionise space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets. Its Dragon spacecraft has been delivering cargo to and from the International Space Station since 2012. Meanwhile, the team released a video last week showing its first test firing of a used Falcon 9 rocket stage, which was previously launched and landed in May. The reuse and recycling of equipment is key to lowering the cost of future launches.

Proving that not all space projects have to have an “X” in their title, my Dutch compatriots running the Mars One mission are no less bold in their ambition. The goal here is to set up a permanent human settlement on the Red Planet, with the first – unmanned – trip scheduled to take off in 2020. I can’t decide whether to be surprised that more than 200,000 people applied to go on the one-way journey, but the final selection process promises to be tough, based on the candidates’ ability to cope with living in harsh, mocked-up Mars conditions. Maybe they should try these out on some Big Brother contestants first?

Back on the ground, something equally fantastic is happening. It’s Hyperloop One, which is also the brainchild of Elon Musk. Again there is a competition element, with teams around the world being challenged come up with a system to transport people and goods, safely and quickly, in what is basically a low-pressure environment inside a giant tube. It sounds like something from Blade Runner and the Hyperloop team has even named its test rig after the sci-fi classic. The company’s first factory opened last week and so far there are three confirmed Global Challenge partnerships running in Los Angeles, Switzerland and between Finland and Sweden.

For those of us who haven’t signed up for a space mission or Hyperloop One project, there are also some interesting developments in the pipeline, but I’ll save those for another time.

With all this talk of travel, you could be forgiven for thinking that I’m on holiday just now. I’m not, and I’m not about to tell you what’s on my reading list, which the Financial Times has outed as the latest way for CEOs to brag... But I am going to offer you one idea for your own list.

A while ago I took the liberty of mentioning that I would be publishing my own business book. This is now on sale if you are interested. It is based on my experiences at EE and charts the transformation journey to create the company, along with some practical tips.

It is called “The 4G Mobile Revolution: Creation, Innovation and Transformation at EE”. The publishers have set up a discount that will give my LinkedIn followers 20% off the published price on their website. Just follow the link above and enter the code OLAF4GL20 at the checkout :) I should make it clear that my share of any profits will go to charities chosen by employees at EE’s contact centres.

With that I wish you a good summer and, if you are due to travel, a bon voyage.

Photo credit: Buck