Aurelian Voyages

Aurelian Voyages has been selling the solar system as a holiday destination since 2134. From its offices in Toulouse it sells everything from a weekend at a lunar crater lodge to a three-month grand tour of Mars, and it carries more than 180,000 leisure passengers a year.

Its flagship product is the Mars Grand Tour, flown on three Halcyon Starliners. Each 520-metre Starliner carries 1,200 passengers on rotating spin-gravity decks, with four pilots on the flight deck and a cabin and hotel crew of 64. A helium-3 fusion drive gives it a top speed of 520 km/s and a 45 AU reach, comfortably enough for the Earth–Luna–Mars circuit. Each liner cost Aurelian 1,680 million credits, a sum the company calls 'the price of a city that flies'.

Ten Kestrel shuttles bring guests up from Earth spaceports to the liners, while twelve Wren Microlifters offer short, single-pilot excursions from orbit down to lunar and Martian landing sites for small groups of two.

Aurelian's guests rarely notice the engineering, which is the point. The Starliner's rotating decks give a steady 0.8 g, its cabins are shielded against solar storms, and the trip from Earth orbit to Mars takes around six weeks at cruise speed, with lunar stopovers on the outbound leg. The company's marketing team describes the fleet mix simply: the Starliner is the hotel, the Kestrel is the airport bus and the Wren is the taxi to the view.

In 2186 Aurelian ran the first commercial solar-eclipse cruise from Mars orbit, watching Phobos cross the Sun. Thiago Santos, Halcyon's interior design lead, collaborated with Aurelian on the Starliner's panorama lounges.