Space Tourism

Introduction

We all love to travel all around the world. The global tourism industry was worth about $1.7 trillion in the year 2018. The tourism industry has become one of the most important sources of income in most of the regions. So what if we travel to space and see the one that we have never seen? How is it feel?

There are many types of space tourism which includes including orbital, suborbital, and lunar space tourism. As of now, orbital space tourism is performed only by the Russian Space Agency. Space Adventures is the only company to have coordinated tourism flights to earth’s orbit. The Virginia-based organization has worked with Russia to utilize its Soyuz shuttle to fly ultra-well off people to the ISS. The vacationers included business visionary and space financial specialist Anousheh Ansari and Cirque du Soleil fellow benefactor Guy Laliberté. Those missions were evaluated at around $20 million each. The space business could before long be set out toward a travel industry upheaval if SpaceX and Boeing follow through on their arrangements to take sightseers to orbit.

Sub-orbital Space Tourism

Successful Projects - Scaled Composites with SpaceShipOne in October 2004 won the $10 million X Prize as the first private company to reach and surpass over 62mi twice within two weeks. Michael Melvill, the first commercial astronaut who flew the first flight in 2004 over the height of 100 km.

Ongoing Projects - Virgin Galactic offers regular suborbital spaceflights to the passengers who pay with a fleet of five SpaceShipTwo-class spaceplanes. Blue Origin is developing the reusable suborbital launch system specifically to enable short-duration space tourism. It plans to carry at the max of six members onboard the New Shepard. In April 2018 the rocket reached 66 miles during the test flight. The rocket is 18 meters in which the capsule is attached to the top of it. Until now the Blue Origin has not started selling the tickets.

Orbital Space Tourism

MirCorp was a commercial space agency founded in 1999 which began seeking potential space tourist to visit Mir to offset its maintenance costs. Dennis Tito an American entrepreneur who is widely known as the first space tourist to pay for his trip. He visited the ISS for seven days in April-May 2001 and reported $20 million for the trip. But after some successful projects, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere in February 2003 killing all the seven crew members. After this disaster, the Soyuz program was put on hold. But later many countries do successful projects.

Currently, Boeing is building CST-100 Starliner capsules as part of the NASA CCDev program and BA 330 is an expandable habitation module with 330 cubic meters of internal space with Vulcan Centaur developed by Bigelow Aerospace. A US startup film named Aurora space station by Orion Span announced a plan to launch the space hotel to orbit within several years. The hotel named Aurora Station can have space for a max of six members and can stay for 12 days at the cost of $9 million for floating in the beautiful unexplored universe.

How about going beyond the earth’s orbit?

SpaceX introduced a spacecraft and super-heavy rocket combined called Starship. Elon Musk Stated that the Starship will be ready for the unpiloted trip in 2022 and the crew flight will follow up in 2024. Another company named Space Adventured Ltd. introduces a circumlunar mission to the moon. It offers a multi-day mission to low earth orbit on SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. We can fly all around the moon and witness the earthrise.

What about the environmental effects?

By the study of NASA and The Aerospace Corporation, which has simulated the impact of 1000 suborbital hybrid rocket launches from a single location can release 600 tones of black carbon into the stratosphere which results in the unbalance that cause the decrease in temperature by about 0.4 °C (0.72 °F) in the tropics and subtropics regions and polar regions gaining 5–6%. There will be an impact in nature but the companies are trying to reduce these impacts and lots and lots of research is going on.

Let’s build safe technologies and take humankind to the one-step forward and explore space.