Space Tourism: A dream too distant to achieve?

The concept of space tourism might have sounded alien to us until a few years back. But today, it has become a reality. Tycoons like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have set up companies that promise to make space tourism a big deal in a few years.

Entrepreneur Dennis Tito and his wife Akiko recently purchased seats for a private trip with SpaceX’s Starship rocket. It is the third such spaceflight Elon Musk’s company has announced to date. 82-year-old Tito is not new to the concept of flying to space. He was the first private space tourist and flew with Russia to the International Space Station in 2001.

“I’ve been wanting to go to the moon since my first trip to space,” Tito said.

Akiko, 57, and Tito will also become the first married couple to fly around the Moon. However, unlike the previously announced Starship flights, they haven’t booked the entire flights. The other eight seats are still available.

However, the three flights are years away from becoming a reality. For one, SpaceX has yet to reach orbit with a Starship prototype. The company also has an expensive and high-profile NASA astronaut moon mission under contract. Besides, it needs to begin using the rocket to more rapidly deploy Starlink satellites.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin is another company that aims to send humans to space for leisure. It wants to make access to space cheaper and more reliable , for which it relies on reusable launch vehicles. Its primary focus area is suborbital spaceflight and the company has designed, built and flown multiple testbeds of its New Shepard vehicle.

It was initially supposed to send passenger to space in 2018, but the date has been revised several times since. With no fixed date about its commercial passenger flights yet, Blue Origin’s plans for space tourism remain fat fetched. Although, Jeff Bezos himself flew on a 10-minute space flight on July 20, 2021 as part of the four-member crewed mission into space.

However, it was Richard Branson who became the first spaceflight company founder to travel on his own ship into outer space on July 11, 2021. Virgin Galactic‘s maiden spaceflight happened in 2018 with its VSS Unity spaceship. Branson was initially targeting 2010 for its maiden spaceflight, but it kept being delayed.

Right now, Virgin Galactic looks ahead of its competitors. It opened ticket sales to the public in February 2022 and also has several reservations that were made before this. In total, it has 700 reservations and aims to send three flights per month starting some time in 2023.

How much does it cost? Well, $450,000.