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In April of 2001, Dennis Tito
became the first traveler to pay for a trip to space
with money out of his own pocket. He decided to do it
and then just did it. That's what tourism is all about.
His flight, and the subsequent one by Mark Shuttleworth,
forever removed the giggle factor from discussions
of space tourism.
In October of 2004, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne
won the X
PRIZE and thereby started a new race to develop
the first vehicle that will provide suborbital
space rides to paying customers. Suborbital generally
refers to an up-and-down ( i.e. mostly vertical)
flight that reaches an altitude of around 100km or more
but does not go into orbit around the earth.
Market
Studies by NASA and
many other organizations have shown that there are sizable
markets for space tourism, both suborbital and orbital,
and that the markets will grow rapidly as the cost of
sending a person into space drops from current levels.
Adventure tourism, such as trips to Antarctica or Mount
Everest, has long been a profitable business. This can
involve packages with prices as high as $100k range
and even higher.
Though you commonly hear talk of "space
joyrides for the rich", the development of
space tourism will follow the normal course of development
seen for most all consumer technologies and services.
Tourism itself began as something only done by the
very rich.
Passenger flights on airlines were initially very
expensive. VCRs, DVDs, PCs, etc. all started out as
very expensive "toys". Eventually competition
and economies of scale (i.e. mass production) take
over and prices drop to the level the middle class
can handle.
Before orbital rides are widely available, suborbital
flights will be the most common way to ride
into space. Going to 100km or so, one can see the horizon
out to 1000km or so and clearly see the curvature of
the earth and the blackness of space.
The billionaire Richard Branson in September 2004 announced
a contract with Burt Rutan that gave him funding to
design and build a 5-8 passenger vehicle - unofficially
referred to here as SpaceShipTwo. SS2 will safely
and routinely fly above 100km for a cost of about $200k
per seat.
Within a month of this announcement, Virgin
Galactic already had 7000 people expressing
strong interest in buying tickets to ride on the vehicle
when it becomes available. The current goal is to begin
flights in 2007.
The company Space
Adventures also has had over 100 people place
deposits, or pay the full $98k price, on a suborbital
craft as soon as one become available. In the meantime,
this company and others offer rides on MIG-25's that
go to 25km in altitude.
You can also train for spaceflight by experiencing
microgravity in Russian plane flying parabolic
trajectories. The company ZERO-G
in October 2004 began offering such rides in the US
for $3000 per person. The first 20 flights were already
sold out before they began regular service.
If you can't pay for an orbital trip, perhaps you can
win a ride.
There are now several contests in which the winner will
go into space.
There have been announcements of several "Survivor"
type reality format TV
programs in which a group of contestants
will struggle through several weeks of cosmonaut training
and the winner going to the International Space Station.
However, so far none of these programs have reached
the production stage.
A commercial space habitat prototype built
by Bigelow
Aerospace.
For the time when orbital flights become lower in price,
there are companies designing space
hotels where you can enjoy microgravity sports
and great views of earth. The company Bigelow
Aerospace will begin launching prototypes
in 2005 of its inflatable space habitat and will launch
a full scaled version that can be manned by 2010.
See this slide
presentation by Sam Coniglio at the Space
Tourism Society for a nice overview of the possibilities
for future space tourism.
If you would like to travel in space in spirit only,
then send a token
of yourself, e.g. your name or DNA sample,
on a space probe.
See also the section on Astronomy
Tourism that involves trips to see eclipses,
Aurora and other astronomical phenomena.
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