Space tourism is a niche segment of the aviation industry which provides tourists ability to become astronauts for recreational, business and leisure purposes at a fee basis. First, what counts as space travel?
Féderátion Aéronautique Internationale is the world governing body that certifies and controls global astronautical records. It defines the boundary between space and earth’s atmosphere using Karman line, which lies 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Earth’s mean sea level. But not everybody follows this definition, for example, F.A.A. (Federal Aviation Administration) and NASA, defines the outer space as everything above 50 miles from earth.
Space tourism has been in headlines recently and attracted much attention of general public since the rise of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its successful flights using Falcon rockets. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and British billionaire, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic successful commercial sub-orbital last year are a major leap for commercial space tourism. But space tourism is not a ‘coming of the age’ thing but rather it has been around for decades.
Similar to the space race, Russia was the first to send human to space on a commercial basis. Dennis Tito, an American businessman and former JPL scientist visited the ISS (International Space Station) aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft during April-May 2001 becoming world’s first “fee-paying” space tourist. South African businessman, Mark Shuttleworth and American businessman, Greg Olsen became the world’s second and third commercial space tourist. On September 18 2006, Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian entrepreneur, became the first female space tourist and the fourth space tourist overall. All these flights were bound to ISS and used Russian Soyuz vehicles for travel. Since the Columbia disaster of 2003, NASA grounded its Space Shuttle launch vehicle for 2-year period and after the retirement of Space Shuttle in 2011, Soyuz became the only means of accessing ISS, and so space tourism was hold.
After making strides in electric vehicles and reusable rockets industry, Elon musk’s Space X flipped the script for the space tourism industry. On September 16, 2021, Inspiration4 mission on SpaceX Falcon 9 spend almost 3 days in orbit aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience, becoming the first all-civilian crew to fly an orbital space mission. Space tourism can be classified into orbital and sub-orbital space tourism. As of 2022, Space Adventures, Eric Johnson’s space tourism company and SpaceX are the only companies to have carried out successful tourism flights to Earth’s orbit (beyond Karman line). For the sub-orbital space tourism projects, in 2004 Scaled Composites, Northrop Grumman’s aerospace company became the first private company to surpass Karman line but the flight had no space tourists even though the vehicle had seats for passengers. The big break came in last year when within a ten-day period both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin completed successful flights on VSS Unity and New Shepard respectively to the space with passengers aboard in July 2021.
Space tourism has opened a new chapter for the human tourism/travel; would-be space tourist doesn’t need to undergo rigorous test from space agencies such as NASA to see the mother earth from up above. While the SpaceX flights cost in millions of US dollars Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin offers sub-orbital experience for cost of around 250,000* USD. Many new companies such as Space Perspective is also developing its own touristic balloon spaceship with proposed departure from Florida in 2024, at cost of 125,00 USD. Some believes the space tourism is likely to remain as tiny fraction of commercial space exploration similar to travel on Mt. Everest while others believe it will evolve much like civilian air travel did.
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