Today, the time has come where people want to have the craziest of experiences that they could have. New things are being tried out by people and their age doesn’t stop them from doing all that.
Bungee Jumping and Paragliding were to say less thrilling to these people that they now want to see the space, travel in a spacecraft, see the earth from above.
Space tourism was a concept that was changed into reality when the first space tourist, Dennis Tito boarded the Soyuz craft for an 8 days trip to the International Space Station in 2001. He paid US$20 million for the trip and till today counts the trip as a marvelous experience in his life.
When a human travels in space for recreational purposes it is called space tourism. There are several kinds of space tourism which include Orbital, suborbital, and lunar tourism.
Till now, orbital tourism is only carried out by Roscosmos, but it’s the modern era and therefore sub-orbital tourism vehicles are being developed by private companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin.
Also, SpaceX is developing vehicles for lunar tourism. The space tourism industry can be revolutionized if both SpaceX and Boeing succeed with their plans to conduct orbital tourism flights.
Orbital Space Tourism:
An orbital flight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft is placed in a trajectory in space in which it can complete at least one orbit around the Earth. Its altitude is around 80 km and is often referred to as the boundary of space. The term orbital spaceflight is used to differentiate it from suborbital flights.
As of recent times, orbital tourism is coordinated by a single company, Space adventure. It has worked with Russia to take ultra-wealthy people to the ISS in Soyuz spacecraft in return for a considerable amount. Mostly the missions were priced at $20 million.
There were many successful missions about orbital tourism which includes Dennis Tito in 2001, Mark Shuttlesworth in 2002, Gregory Olsen in 2005, Anousheh Ansari in 2006, Charles Simoni (the first repeat space tourist) in 2007 and 2009, Richard Garriott in 2008, and Guy Laliberté in 2009.
Many other future projects are also being talked about. The Boeing Starliner is one of them. It is being developed as a part of NASA’s commercial flight program and will take tourists to the ISS just as the Roscosmos did. Other projects include SpaceX Axiom Space-1 and Space adventure Crew Dragon mission.
Suborbital Space Tourism:
A Suborbital flight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft does not escape the gravity of the body from which it is launched. In other words, the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects with the atmosphere so that it can’t complete an orbital revolution.
Virgin Galactic which is a joint venture was founded in 2005 between Scaled composites and Richard Branson’s Virgin group. It began building SpaceShipTwo class – Spaceplanes. The first one was VSS Enterprise.
Over 700 tickets of $200,000 were sold before it met with an accident over the Mojave Desert during a test flight.
Later a new spaceplane, VSS Unity is developed and it also completed a successful test flight on July 11, 2021, with four passengers on board, the owner of virgin group Richard Branson being one of them.
Blue Origin, a Jeff Bezos founded company is also a suborbital spaceflight services company. They developed a reusable suborbital launch system especially to make short-duration space tourism called the New Shepard.
The capsule is attached to the top of a rocket and can ferry 6 passengers at a time. This rocket was also successfully launched with 4 passengers, Jeff Bezos being one of them, on July 20, 2021, and reached an altitude of 107 km.
The attitude towards space tourism is positive but like every other thing, it is met with some criticism.
According to a survey 70% of the people wanted less than or equal to 2 weeks in space, 88% wanted to spacewalk, and 21% wanted a space hotel. This concludes that space tourism has a lot of economic potentials too. People are interested in it and are willing to travel to space.
Written by: Bhavish Doshi
Edited by: Gourav Chowdhury
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