Space Travel for Everyone: The Intergalactic Travel Bureau

Trudging through the mire of midtown Manhattan in the middle of a July heat wave makes you long for relief from your earthly trials—and at the corner of 8th Avenue and 37th Street last week, you could find one. Nautilus popped in to the Intergalactic Travel Bureau, a pop-up shop promoting moon-hopping, sun-surfing, and all forms of interplanetary tourism. The Bureau’s cheerful staff of astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians helped clients plan a variety of trips, some of which ran to the billions of dollars. We spoke to two “travel agents to the stars,” Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich*. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation.

What sets you apart from a standard travel agency?

: We are the only travel bureau that offers space vacations exclusively. I think a lot of people are getting a tired of the Earth and want