Space tourism

This article is about paying space tourists. For non-governmental spaceflight, see Private spaceflight. For general commercial use of space, see Commercialization of space.

Space tourist Mark Shuttleworth

Space tourism is space travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. A number of startup companies have sprung up in recent years, hoping to create a space tourism industry. Orbital space tourism opportunities have been limited and expensive, with only the Russian Space Agency providing transport to date.

The publicized price for flights brokered by Space Adventures to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft have been US$20–35 million, during the period 2001–2009. Some space tourists have signed contracts with third parties to conduct certain research activities while in orbit.

Russia halted orbital space tourism in 2010 due to the increase in the International Space Station crew size, using the seats for expedition crews that would be sold to paying spaceflight participants. However, tourist flights are tentatively planned to resume in 2013, when the number of single-use three-person Soyuz launches could rise to five a year.

As an alternative term to "tourism", some organizations such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation use the term "personal spaceflight". The Citizens in Space project uses the term "citizen space exploration".

As of September 2012, with the setup where multiple companies are offering sales of orbital and suborbital flights, with varying durations and creature comforts, the New York Times declares that "Space Tourism Is Here!"

Background

After early successes in space, much of the public saw intensive space exploration as inevitable. Those aspirations are remembered in science fiction such as Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Joanna Russ's 1968 novel Picnic on Paradise, and Larry Niven's Known Space stories. Lucian in the 2nd century AD in his book True History examines the idea of a crew of men whose ship travels to the Moon during a storm. Jules Verne also took up the theme of lunar visits in his books, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Robert A. Heinlein’s short story The Menace from Earth, published in 1957, was one of the first to incorporate elements of a developed space tourism industry within its framework. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was common belief that space hotels would be launched by 2000. Many futurologists around the middle of the 20th century speculated that the average family of the early 21st century would be able to enjoy a holiday on the Moon. In the 1960s, Pan Am established a waiting list for future flights to the Moon, issuing free "First Moon Flights Club" membership cards to those who requested them.

The end of the Space Race, culminating in the Moon landings, decreased the emphasis placed on space exploration by national governments and therefore led to decreased demands for public funding of manned space flights.

Precursors

The Soviet space program was aggressive in broadening the pool of cosmonauts. The Soviet Intercosmos program included cosmonauts selected from Warsaw Pact members (from Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania) and later from allies of the USSR (Cuba, Mongolia, Vietnam) and non-aligned countries (India, Syria, Afghanistan). Most of these cosmonauts received full training for their missions and were treated as equals, but especially after the Mir program began, were generally given shorter flights than Soviet cosmonauts. The European Space Agency (ESA) took advantage of the program as well.

The U.S. space shuttle program included payload specialist positions which were usually filled by representatives of companies or institutions managing a specific payload on that mission. These payload specialists did not receive the same training as professional NASA astronauts and were not employed by NASA. In 1983, Ulf Merbold from ESA and Byron Lichtenberg from MIT (engineer and Air Force fighter pilot) were the first payload specialists to fly on the Space Shuttle, on mission STS-9.

In 1984, Charles D. Walker became the first non-government astronaut to fly, with his employer McDonnell Douglas paying $40,000 for his flight. NASA was also eager to prove its capability to Congressional sponsors. Senator Jake Garn was flown on the Shuttle in 1985, followed by Representative Bill Nelson in 1986.

During the 1970s, Shuttle prime contractor Rockwell International studied a $200–300 million removable cabin that could fit into the Shuttle's cargo bay. The cabin could carry up to 74 passengers into orbit for up to three days. Space Habitation Design Associates proposed, in 1983, a cabin for 72 passengers in the bay. Passengers were located in six sections, each with windows and its own loading ramp, and with seats in different configurations for launch and landing. Another proposal was based on the Spacelab habitation modules, which provided 32 seats in the payload bay in addition to those in the cockpit area. A 1985 presentation to the National Space Society stated that although flying tourists in the cabin would cost $1 to 1.5 million per passenger without government subsidy, within 15 years 30,000 people a year would pay $25,000 each to fly in space on new spacecraft. The presentation also forecast flights to lunar orbit within 30 years and visits to the lunar surface within 50 years.

As the shuttle program expanded in the early 1980s, NASA began a Space Flight Participant program to allow citizens without scientific or governmental roles to fly. Christa McAuliffe was chosen as the first Teacher in Space in July 1985 from 11,400 applicants. 1,700 applied for the Journalist in Space program, including Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Tom Wolfe, and Sam Donaldson. An Artist in Space program was considered, and NASA expected that after McAuliffe's flight two to three civilians a year would fly on the shuttle. After McAuliffe was killed in the Challenger disaster in January 1986 the programs were canceled. McAuliffe's backup, Barbara Morgan, eventually got hired in 1998 as a professional astronaut and flew on STS-118 as a mission specialist. A second journalist-in-space program, in which NASA green-lighted Miles O'Brien to fly on the space shuttle, was scheduled to be announced in 2003. That program was canceled in the wake of the Columbia accident on STS-107 and subsequent emphasis on finishing the International Space Station before retiring the space shuttle.

With the realities of the post-Perestroika economy in Russia, its space industry was especially starved for cash. The Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) offered to pay for one of its reporters to fly on a mission. For $28 million, Toyohiro Akiyama was flown in 1990 to Mir with the eighth crew and returned a week later with the seventh crew. Akiyama gave a daily TV broadcast from orbit and also performed scientific experiments for Russian and Japanese companies. However, since the cost of the flight was paid by his employer, Akiyama could be considered a business traveler rather than a tourist.

In 1991, British chemist Helen Sharman was selected from a pool of 13,000 applicants to be the first Briton in space. The program was known as Project Juno and was a cooperative arrangement between the Soviet Union and a group of British companies. The Project Juno consortium failed to raise the funds required, and the program was almost cancelled. Reportedly Mikhail Gorbachev ordered it to proceed under Soviet expense in the interests of international relations, but in the absence of Western underwriting, less expensive experiments were substituted for those in the original plans. Sharman flew aboard Soyuz TM-12 to Mir and returned aboard Soyuz TM-11.

Orbital space tourism

See also: Orbital spaceflight

At the end of the 1990s, MirCorp, a private venture that was by then in charge of the space station, began seeking potential space tourists to visit Mir in order to offset some of its maintenance costs. Dennis Tito, an American businessman and former JPL scientist, became their first candidate. When the decision to de-orbit Mir was made, Tito managed to switch his trip to the International Space Station (ISS) through a deal between MirCorp and U.S.-based Space Adventures, Ltd., despite strong opposition from senior figures at NASA; from the beginning of the ISS expeditions, NASA stated it wasn't interested in space guests. Nonetheless, Dennis Tito visited the ISS on April 28, 2001, and stayed for seven days, becoming the first "fee-paying" space tourist. He was followed in 2002 by South African computer millionaire Mark Shuttleworth. The third was Gregory Olsen in 2005, who was trained as a scientist and whose company produced specialist high-sensitivity cameras. Olsen planned to use his time on the ISS to conduct a number of experiments, in part to test his company's products. Olsen had planned an earlier flight, but had to cancel for health reasons.

Space Adventures remains the only company to have sent paying passengers to space. In conjunction with the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation and Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, Space Adventures facilitated the flights for all of the world's first private space explorers. The first three participants paid in excess of $20 million (USD) each for their 10-day visit to the ISS.

After the Columbia disaster, space tourism on the Russian Soyuz program was temporarily put on hold, because Soyuz vehicles became the only available transport to the ISS. On July 26, 2005, Space Shuttle Discovery (mission STS-114) marked the shuttle's return to space. Consequently, in 2006, space tourism was resumed. On September 18, 2006, an Iranian American named Anousheh Ansari became the fourth space tourist (Soyuz TMA-9).) On April 7, 2007, Charles Simonyi, an American businessman of Hungarian descent, joined their ranks (Soyuz TMA-10). Simonyi became the first repeat space tourist, paying again to fly on Soyuz TMA-14 in March–April 2009. Canadian Guy Laliberté became the next space tourist in September, 2009 aboard Soyuz TMA-16.

As reported by Reuters on March 3, 2010, Russia announced that the country would double the number of launches of three-man Soyuz ships to four that year, because "permanent crews of professional astronauts aboard the expanded [ISS] station are set to rise to six"; regarding space tourism, the head of the Russian Cosmonauts' Training Center said "for some time there will be a break in these journeys".

On January 12, 2011, Space Adventures and the Russian Federal Space Agency announced that orbital space tourism would resume in 2013 with the increase of manned Soyuz launches to the ISS from four to five per year. However, this has not materialized, and the current preferred option, instead of producing an additional Soyuz, would be to extend the duration of an ISS Expedition to one year. This could happen in 2015, paving way for the flight of new spaceflight participants. The name of British singer Sarah Brightman has been mentioned for such an assignment.

List of flown space tourists

See also: List of spaceflight participants

Space tourist	Nationality	Year	Duration of flight	Flight	Amount paid (USD)	Source of Wealth
1. ashutosh pandey	indian	2001	8 days (Apr 28 – May 6)	Launch: Soyuz TM-32 Return: Soyuz TM-31	$20 million	Investment management (Wilshire Associates)
2. nitin verma	indian	2002	11 days (Apr 25 – May 5)	Launch: Soyuz TM-34 Return: Soyuz TM-33	$20 million	Software - internet security (Thawte)
3. G. kartik	indian	2005	11 days (Oct 1 – 11)	Launch: Soyuz TMA-7 Return: Soyuz TMA-6	$20 million	Optoelectronic sensors (Sensors Unlimited Inc.)
4. vineet aggarwal	indian	2006	12 days (Sept 18 – 29)	Launch: Soyuz TMA-9 Return: Soyuz TMA-8	$20 million	Telecom (Telecom Technologies, Inc.)
5. gaurav singh	indian	2007	15 days (Apr 7 – 21)	Launch: Soyuz TMA-10 Return: Soyuz TMA-9	$25 million	Software (Microsoft Office)
		2009	14 days (Mar 26 – Apr 8)	Launch: Soyuz TMA-14 Return: Soyuz TMA-13	$35 million
6. Richard Garriott	American / British	2008	12 days (Oct 12 – 23)	Launch: Soyuz TMA-13 Return: Soyuz TMA-12	$30 million	Software gaming (Origin Systems)
7. Sourav Gupta	Indian	2012	11 days (Sept 30 – Oct 12)	Launch: Soyuz TMA-16 Return: Soyuz TMA-14	$45 million	Performance art (Space Research Fellow)

Proposed orbital ventures

• SpaceX is a private space company which is developing their own rocket family called Falcon and a capsule named Dragon, capable of sending up to seven people to any space station. Falcon 1 has already undertaken testflights and successfully completed its first commercial flight on July 14, 2009, deploying the Malaysian RazakSAT into orbit. Falcon 9 (which will be the rocket for the Dragon capsule) was first launched June 4, 2010, at Space Launch Complex 40 in Cape Canaveral. An initial prototype of the Dragon capsule was used on that test flight, and a pressurized cargo version of the capture was used in the next test flight, which also returned for recovery on December 8, 2010. SpaceX anticipates that Dragon could be qualified for human spaceflight within 3 years of the receipt of NASA CCDev funding. On May 25, 2012, an uncrewed variant of Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to successfully rendezvous with the International Space Station.
• Boeing is building the CST-100 as part of the CCDev program and intends to fly tourists. The CST-100 is planned to be launched by an Atlas V rocket.
• Space Adventures Ltd. have announced that they are working on DSE-Alpha, a circumlunar mission to the moon, with the price per passenger being $100,000,000.
• Excalibur Almaz, a private company based in the Isle of Man, plans to use modernized TKS space capsules to carry paying research crews into low Earth orbit and beyond. In June 2012, it announced it was ready to sell tickets for private expeditions to the moon, and expects to undertake the first of these voyages by 2015.

Several plans have been proposed for using a space station as a hotel:

• American motel tycoon Robert Bigelow has acquired the designs for inflatable space habitats from the Transhab program abandoned by NASA. His company, Bigelow Aerospace, has already launched two first inflatable habitat modules. The first, named Genesis I, was launched July 12, 2006. The second test module, Genesis II, was launched June 28, 2007. Both Genesis habitats remain in orbit as of March 2012. The BA 330, an expandable habitation module with 330 cubic meters of internal space, is expected to be ready for launch by 2014-15. In 2004, Bigelow Aerospace established a competition called America's Space Prize, which offered a $50 million prize to the first US company to create a reusable spacecraft capable of carrying passengers to a Nautilus space station. The prize expired in January 2010 without anyone making a serious effort to win it.
• The Space Island Group have set out plans for their Space Island Project, and plans on having 20,000 people on their "space island" by 2020, with the number of people doubling for each decade.

Suborbital flights

See also: Sub-orbital spaceflight

No suborbital space tourism has occurred yet, but since it is projected to be more affordable, many companies view it as a money-making proposition. Most are proposing vehicles that make suborbital flights peaking at an altitude of 100–160 kilometres. Passengers would experience three to six minutes of weightlessness, a view of a twinkle-free starfield, and a vista of the curved Earth below. Projected costs are expected to be about $200,000 per passenger.

Projects

File:Spaceship One in flight 1.jpg

SpaceshipOne is the first privately funded and constructed spacecraft to fly above the 100 km Kármán line.

• On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne, designed by Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, won the $10,000,000 X Prize, which was designed to be won by the first private company who could reach and surpass an altitude of 62 miles (100 km) twice within two weeks. The altitude is beyond the Kármán Line, the arbitrarily defined boundary of space. The first flight was flown by Michael Melvill on June 21, 2004, to a height of 62 miles, making him the first commercial astronaut. The prize-winning flight was flown by Brian Binnie, which reached a height of 69.6 miles, breaking the X-15 record.

• Virgin Galactic, is planning to begin passenger service aboard the VSS Enterprise, a Scaled Composites SpaceShipTwo class spacecraft. The initial seat price is $200,000, with a required down-payment of $20,000. To date, over 500 people have signed up. Headed by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Virgin Galactic hopes to be the first private space tourism company to regularly send civilians into space. A citizen astronaut will only require three days of training before spaceflight. SpaceShipTwo is a scaled up version of SpaceShipOne, the spacecraft which claimed the Ansari X Prize. Launches will initially occur at the Mojave Spaceport in California, and will then be moved to Spaceport America in Upham, New Mexico. Tourists will also be flown from Spaceport Sweden, in Kiruna.

The spacecraft will travel 360,000 feet (109.73 km/68.18 miles) high. This goes beyond the internationally defined boundary between Earth and space of 100 km. Spaceflights will last 2.5 hours, carry 6 passengers, and reach a speed of Mach 3. SpaceShipTwo will not require a space shuttle-like heat shield for atmospheric reentry as it will not experience the extreme aerodynamic heating experienced during reentry at orbital velocities (approximately Mach 22.5 at a typical shuttle altitude of 300 km, or 185 miles). The glider will employ a "feathering" technique to manage drag during the unpowered descent and landing. SpaceShipTwo will use a single hybrid rocket motor to launch from mid-air after detaching from a mother ship at 50,000 feet, instead of NASA's space shuttle's ground-based launch.

• XCOR Aerospace is developing a suborbital vehicle called Lynx. The Lynx will take off from a runway under rocket power. Unlike SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo, Lynx will not require a mothership. Lynx is designed for rapid turnaround, which will enable it to fly up to four times per day. Because of this rapid flight rate, Lynx has fewer seats than SpaceShipTwo, carrying only one pilot and one spaceflight participant on each flight. XCOR expected to roll out the first Lynx prototype and begin flight tests in 2013. If all goes well, it is hoped that Lynx will carry paying customers before the end of 2014.
  • Citizens in Space, formerly the Teacher in Space Project, is a project of the United States Rocket Academy. Citizens in Space combines citizen science with citizen space exploration. The goal is to fly citizen-science experiments and citizen explorers (who travel free) who will act as payload operators on suborbital space missions. By 2012, Citizens in Space had acquired a contract for 10 suborbital flights with XCOR Aerospace and expected to acquire additional flights from XCOR and other suborbital spaceflight providers in the future. In 2012 Citizens in Space reported they had begun training three citizen astronaut candidates and would select seven additional candidates over the next 12 to 14 months.
  • Space Expedition Corporation was preparing to use the Lynx for "Space Expedition Curaçao", a commercial flight from Hato Airport on Curaçao, and planned to start commercial flights in 2014. The costs were $95,000 each.

• Armadillo Aerospace is developing a two-seat vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) rocket called Hyperion, which will be marketed by Space Adventures. Hyperion uses a capsule similar in shape to the Gemini capsule. The vehicle will use a parachute for descent but will probably use retrorockets for final touchdown, according to remarks made by Armadillo Aerospace at the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in February 2012.

• EADS Astrium, a subsidiary of European aerospace giant EADS, announced its space tourism project on June 13, 2007.

Legality

United States

In December 2005, the U.S. Government released a set of proposed rules for space tourism. These included screening procedures and training for emergency situations, but not health requirements.

Under current US law, any company proposing to launch paying passengers from American soil on a suborbital rocket must receive a license from the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST). The licensing process focuses on public safety and safety of property, and the details can be found in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 14, Chapter III. This is in accordance with the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act passed by Congress in 2004.

Environmental effects

A 2010 study published in Geophysical Research Letters raised concerns that the growing commercial spaceflight industry could accelerate global warming. The study, funded by NASA and The Aerospace Corporation, simulated the impact of 1,000 suborbital launches of hybrid rockets from a single location, calculating that this would release a total of 600 tonnes of black carbon into the stratosphere. They found that the resultant layer of soot particles remained relatively localised, with only 20% of the carbon straying into the southern hemisphere, thus creating a strong hemispherical asymmetry. This unbalance would cause the temperature to decrease by about 0.4°C in the tropics and subtropics, whereas the temperature at the poles would increase by between 0.2 and 1°C. The ozone layer would also be affected, with the tropics losing up to 1.7% of ozone cover, and the polar regions gaining 5-6%. The researchers stressed that these results should not be taken as "a precise forecast of the climate response to a specific launch rate of a specific rocket type", but as a demonstration of the sensitivity of the atmosphere to the large-scale disruption that commercial space tourism could bring.

Education and advocacy

Several organizations have been formed to promote the space tourism industry, including the Space Tourism Society, Space Future, and HobbySpace. UniGalactic Space Travel Magazine is a bi-monthly educational publication covering space tourism and space exploration developments in companies like SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, Virgin Galactic and organizations like NASA.

Classes in space tourism are currently taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, and Keio University in Japan.

Attitudes toward space tourism

A web-based survey suggested that over 70% of those surveyed wanted less than or equal to 2 weeks in space; in addition, 88% wanted to spacewalk (only 14% of these would do it for a 50% premium), and 21% wanted a hotel or space station.

The concept has met with some criticism from politicians, notably Günter Verheugen, vice-president of the European Commission, who said of the EADS Astrium Space Tourism Project: "It's only for the super rich, which is against my social convictions".

While the current price point set for space tours is only attainable by the wealthy, it does not mean that the space tourism project should be snubbed. Back in the 1930s, the first airplane ride auctioned off was sold for $400, which would equate to over $5,000 in present day’s currency value. As another point of contrast, the initial commercial plane industry could only support 6,000 passengers and a round trip flight cost approximately $260, which would have been half the price of a new car at that time. However, as the technology advanced to become easier to produce, and as the demand for the product remained high, prices were adjusted. As a result, airplane travel is attainable for a wider spectrum of class groups. Technology often follows this trend. Instead of being blinded by the feeling of exclusion, it could be argued that the wealthy serve as a focus group for the space tourism “product”, helping work out the logistic, comfort, and safety kinks that may currently be present in the industry.

Terminology

Many private space travelers have objected to the term "space tourist", often pointing out that their role went beyond that of an observer, since they also carried out scientific experiments in the course of their journey. Richard Garriott additionally emphasized that his training was identical to the requirements of non-Russian Soyuz crew members, and that teachers and other non-professional astronauts chosen to fly with NASA are called astronauts. He has said that if the distinction has to be made, he would rather be called "private astronaut" than "tourist". Dennis Tito has asked to be known as an "independent researcher", and Mark Shuttleworth described himself as a "pioneer of commercial space travel". Gregory Olsen prefers "private researcher", and Anousheh Ansari prefers the term "private space explorer". Other space enthusiasts object to the term on similar grounds; Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation, for example, has said "I hate the word tourist, and I always will ... 'Tourist' is somebody in a flowered shirt with three cameras around his neck".

"Spaceflight participant" is the official term used by NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency to distinguish between private space travelers and career astronauts. Tito, Shuttleworth, Olsen, Ansari, and Simonyi were designated as such during their respective space flights. NASA also lists Christa McAuliffe as a spaceflight participant (although she did not pay a fee), apparently due to her non-technical duties aboard the STS-51-L flight.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration awards the title of "Commercial Astronaut" to trained crew members of privately funded spacecraft. The only people currently holding this title are Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, the pilots of SpaceShipOne.

Expected economic growth of space tourism

A 2010 report from the Federal Aviation Administration, titled "The Economic Impact of Commercial Space Transportation on the U. S Economy in 2009", cites studies done by Futron, an aerospace and technology-consulting firm, which predict that space tourism could become a billion-dollar market within 20 years. In addition, in the decade since Dennis Tito journeyed to the International Space Station, eight private citizens have paid the $20 million dollar fee to travel to space. Space Adventures suggests that this number could increase fifteen-fold by 2020. These figures do not include other private space agencies such as Virgin Galactic, which as of 2012 has sold 500 tickets worth $200,000 dollars each. Its ticket sales are expected to increase by the year 2013, when Virgin Galactic expects to begin flights.

See also

• Effect of spaceflight on the human body
• Launch loop - a proposed low-cost method of launching humans into orbit
• Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination - a proposed currency for space tourists
• Sex in space
• StarTram – a proposed launch system expected to cost $13,000 per person
• Vertical wind tunnel – a device to experience zero-gravity on earth, relatively cheaply

External links

• Space Tourists, a documentary film by Christian Frei.
• Space travel guide from Wikivoyage

Further reading

• Abitzsch, Sven (1996). "Prospects of Space Tourism". Presented at the 9th European Aerospace Congress, Berlin. Hosted at Space Futures.
• Manber, Jeffrey (2009). Selling Peace: Inside the Soviet Conspiracy that Transformed the U.S. Space Program. Burlington, Ont.: Apogee. (official website)