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The Future of Space Tourism Is Now. Well, Not Quite.

From zero-pressure balloon trips to astronaut boot camps, reservations for getting off the planet — or pretending to — are skyrocketing. The prices, however, are still out of this world.

By Debra Kamin

Ilida Alvarez has dreamed of traveling to space since she was a child. But Ms. Alvarez, a legal-mediation firm owner, is afraid of flying, and she isn’t a billionaire — two facts that she was sure, until just a few weeks ago, would keep her fantasy as out of reach as the stars. She was wrong.

Ms. Alvarez, 46, and her husband, Rafael Landestoy, recently booked a flight on a 10-person pressurized capsule that — attached to a massive helium-filled balloon — will gently float to 100,000 feet while passengers sip champagne and recline in ergonomic chairs. The reservation required a $500 deposit; the flight itself will cost $50,000 and last six to 12 hours.

“I feel like it was tailor-made for the chickens like me who don’t want to get on a rocket,” said Ms. Alvarez, whose flight, organized by a company called World View , is scheduled to depart from the Grand Canyon in 2024.

Less than a year after Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson kicked off a commercial space race by blasting into the upper atmosphere within weeks of each other last summer, the global space tourism market is skyrocketing, with dozens of companies now offering reservations for everything from zero-pressure balloon trips to astronaut boot camps and simulated zero-gravity flights. But don’t don your spacesuit just yet. While the financial services company UBS estimates the space travel market will be worth $3 billion by 2030, the Federal Aviation Administration has yet to approve most out-of-this-world trips, and construction has not started on the first space hotel. And while access and options — not to mention launchpads — are burgeoning, space tourism remains astronomically expensive for most.

First, what counts as space travel?

Sixty miles (about 100 kilometers) above our heads lies the Kármán line, the widely accepted aeronautical boundary of the earth’s atmosphere. It’s the boundary used by the Féderátion Aéronautique Internationale, which certifies and controls global astronautical records. But many organizations in the United States, including the F.A.A. and NASA, define everything above 50 miles to be space.

Much of the attention has been focused on a trio of billionaire-led rocket companies: Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin , whose passengers have included William Shatner; Mr. Branson’s Virgin Galactic , where tickets for a suborbital spaceflight start at $450,000; and Elon Musk’s SpaceX , which in September launched an all-civilian spaceflight, with no trained astronauts on board. Mr. Branson’s inaugural Virgin Galactic flight in 2021 reached about 53 miles, while Blue Origin flies above the 62-mile mark. Both are eclipsed by SpaceX, whose rockets charge far deeper in to the cosmos, reaching more than 120 miles above Earth.

Balloons, like those operated by World View, don’t go nearly as high. But even at their maximum altitude of 18 or 19 miles, operators say they float high enough to show travelers the curvature of the planet, and give them a chance to experience the overview effect — an intense perspective shift that many astronauts say kicks in when you view Earth from above.

Now, how to get there …

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, which are both licensed for passenger space travel by the F.A.A., are open for ticket sales. (Blue Origin remains mum on pricing.) Both companies currently have hundreds or even thousands of earthlings on their wait lists for a whirl to the edge of space. SpaceX charges tens of millions of dollars for its further-reaching flights and is building a new facility in Texas that is currently under F.A.A. review.

Craig Curran is a major space enthusiast — he’s held a reserved seat on a Virgin Galactic flight since 2011 — and the owner of Deprez Travel in Rochester, N.Y. The travel agency has a special space travel arm, Galactic Experiences by Deprez , through which Mr. Curran sells everything from rocket launch tickets to astronaut training.

Sales in the space tourism space, Mr. Curran acknowledges, “are reasonably difficult to make,” and mostly come from peer-to-peer networking. “You can imagine that people who spend $450,000 to go to space probably operate in circles that are not the same as yours and mine,” he said.

Some of Mr. Curran’s most popular offerings include flights where you can experience the same stomach-dropping feeling of zero gravity that astronauts feel in space, which he arranges for clients via chartered, specialized Boeing 727s that are flown in parabolic arcs to mimic being in space. Operators including Zero G also offer the service; the cost is around $8,200.

You can almost count the number of completed space tourist launches on one hand — Blue Origin has had four; SpaceX, two. Virgin Galactic, meanwhile, on Thursday announced the launch of its commercial passenger service, previously scheduled for late 2022, was delayed until early 2023. Many of those on waiting lists are biding their time before blastoff by signing up for training. Axiom Space, which contracts with SpaceX, currently offers NASA-partnered training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. Virgin Galactic, which already offers a “customized Future Astronaut Readiness program” at its Spaceport America facility in New Mexico, is also partnering with NASA to build a training program for private astronauts.

Would-be space tourists should not expect the rigor that NASA astronauts face. Training for Virgin Galactic’s three-hour trips is included in the cost of a ticket and lasts a handful of days; it includes pilot briefings and being “fitted for your bespoke Under Armour spacesuit and boots,” according to its website.

Not ready for a rocket? Balloon rides offer a less hair-raising celestial experience.

“We go to space at 12 miles an hour, which means that it’s very smooth and very gentle. You’re not rocketing away from earth,” said Jane Poynter, a co-founder and co-chief executive of Space Perspective , which is readying its own touristic balloon spaceship, Spaceship Neptune. If all goes according to plan, voyages are scheduled to begin departing from Florida in 2024, at a cost of $125,000 per person. That’s a fraction of the price tag for Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, but still more than double the average annual salary of an American worker.

Neither Space Perspective nor World View has the required approval yet from the F.A.A. to operate flights.

Unique implications

Whether a capsule or a rocket is your transport, the travel insurance company battleface launched a civilian space insurance plan in late 2021, a direct response, said chief executive Sasha Gainullin, to an increase in space tourism interest and infrastructure. Benefits include accidental death and permanent disablement in space and are valid for spaceflights on operators like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, as well as on stratospheric balloon rides. They’ve had many inquiries, Mr. Gainullin said, but no purchases just yet.

“Right now it’s such high-net-worth individuals who are traveling to space, so they probably don’t need insurance,” he said. “But for quote-unquote regular travelers, I think we’ll see some takeups soon.”

And as the industry grows, so perhaps will space travel’s impact on the environment. Not only do rocket launches have immense carbon footprints, even some stratospheric balloon flights have potentially significant implications: World View’s balloons are powered by thousands of cubic meters of helium, which is a limited resource . But Ted Parson, a professor of environmental law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that space travel’s environmental impact is still dwarfed by civil aviation. And because space travel is ultra-niche, he believes it’s likely to stay that way.

“Despite extensive projections, space tourism is likely to remain a tiny fraction of commercial space exploration,” he said. “It reminds me of tourism on Mt. Everest. It’s the indulgence of very rich people seeking a transcendent, once-in-a-lifetime experience, and the local environmental burden is intense.”

Stay a while?

In the future, space enthusiasts insist, travelers won’t be traveling to space just for the ride. They’ll want to stay a while. Orbital Assembly Corporation, a manufacturing company whose goal is to colonize space, is currently building the world’s first space hotels — two ring-shaped properties that will orbit Earth, called Pioneer Station and Voyager Station. The company, quite optimistically, projects an opening date of 2025 for Pioneer Station, with a capacity of 28 guests. The design for the larger Voyager Station , which they say will open in 2027, promises villas and suites, as well as a gym, restaurant and bar. Both provide the ultimate luxury: simulated gravity. Axiom Space , a space infrastructure company, is currently building the world’s first private space station; plans include Philippe Starck-designed accommodations for travelers to spend the night.

Joshua Bush, chief executive of travel agency Avenue Two Travel , has sold a handful of seats on upcoming Virgin Galactic flights to customers. The market for space travel (and the sky-high prices that come with it), he believes, will evolve much like civilian air travel did.

“In the beginning of the 20th century, only very affluent people could afford to fly,” he said. “Just as we have Spirit and Southwest Airlines today, there will be some sort of equivalent of that in space travel, too. Hopefully within my lifetime.”

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What’s Up in Space and Astronomy

Keep track of things going on in our solar system and all around the universe..

Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other 2024 event  that’s out of this world with  our space and astronomy calendar .

A speeding star is traveling through the Milky Way at around a million miles an hour. It could be moving fast enough to break free from the gravitational clutches of the galaxy .

In 1924, a radio receiver built for the battlefields of World War I tested the idea that humans were not alone in the solar system, heralding a century of searches for extraterrestrial life .

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Is Pluto a planet? And what is a planet, anyway? Test your knowledge here .

Space Tourism: Can A Civilian Go To Space?

2021 has been a busy year for private space tourism: overall, more than 15 civilians took a trip to space during this year. In this article, you will learn more about the space tourism industry, its history, and the companies that are most likely to make you a space tourist.

What is space tourism?

Brief history of space tourism, space tourism companies, orbital and suborbital space flights, how much does it cost for a person to go to space, is space tourism worth it, can i become a space tourist, why is space tourism bad for the environment.

Space tourism is human space travel for recreational or leisure purposes . It’s divided into different types, including orbital, suborbital, and lunar space tourism.

However, there are broader definitions for space tourism. According to the Space Tourism Guide , space tourism is a commercial activity related to space that includes going to space as a tourist, watching a rocket launch, going stargazing, or traveling to a space-focused destination.

The first space tourist was Dennis Tito, an American multimillionaire, who spent nearly eight days onboard the International Space Station in April 2001. This trip cost him $20 million and made Tito the first private citizen who purchased his space ticket. Over the next eight years, six more private citizens followed Tito to the International Space Station to become space tourists.

As space tourism became a real thing, dozens of companies entered this industry hoping to capitalize on renewed public interest in space, including Blue Origin in 2000 and Virgin Galactic in 2004. In the 2000s, space tourists were limited to launches aboard Russian Soyuz aircraft and only could go to the ISS. However, everything changed when the other players started to grow up on the market. There are now a variety of destinations and companies for travels to space.

There are now six major space companies that are arranging or planning to arrange touristic flights to space:

• Virgin Galactic;
• Blue Origin;
• Axiom Space;
• Space Perspective.

While the first two are focused on suborbital flights, Axiom and Boeing are working on orbital missions. SpaceX, in its turn, is prioritizing lunar tourism in the future. For now, Elon Musk’s company has allowed its Crew Dragon spacecraft to be chartered for orbital flights, as it happened with the Inspiration4 3-day mission . Space Perspective is developing a different balloon-based system to carry customers to the stratosphere and is planning to start its commercial flights in 2024.

Orbital and suborbital flights are very different. Taking an orbital flight means staying in orbit; in other words, going around the planet continually at a very high speed to not fall back to the Earth. Such a trip takes several days, even a week or more. A suborbital flight in its turn is more like a space hop — you blast off, make a huge arc, and eventually fall back to the Earth, never making it into orbit. A flight duration, in this case, ranges from 2 to 3 hours.

Here is an example: a spaceflight takes you to an altitude of 100 km above the Earth. To enter into orbit — make an orbital flight — you would have to gain a speed of about 28,000 km per hour (17,400 mph) or more. But to reach the given altitude and fall back to the Earth — make a suborbital flight — you would have to fly at only 6,000 km per hour (3,700 mph). This flight takes less energy, less fuel; therefore, it is less expensive.

• Virgin Galactic: $250,000 for a 2-hour suborbital flight at an altitude of 80 km;
• Blue Origin: approximately $300,000 for 12 minutes suborbital flight at an altitude of 100 km;
• Axiom Space: $55 million for a 10-day orbital flight;
• Space Perspective: $125,000 for a 6-hour flight to the edge of space (32 km above the Earth).

The price depends, but remember that suborbital space flights are always cheaper.

What exactly do you expect from a journey to space? Besides the awesome impressions, here is what you can experience during such a trip:

• Weightlessness . Keep in mind that during a suborbital flight you’ll get only a couple of minutes in weightlessness, but it will be truly fascinating .
• Space sickness . The symptoms include cold sweating, malaise, loss of appetite, nausea, fatigue, and vomiting. Even experienced astronauts are not immune from it!
• G-force . 1G is the acceleration we feel due to the force of gravity; a usual g-force astronauts experience during a rocket launch is around 3gs. To understand how a g-force influences people , watch this video.

For now, the most significant barrier for space tourism is price. But air travel was also once expensive; a one-way ticket cost more than half the price of a new car . Most likely, the price for space travel will reduce overtime as well. For now, you need to be either quite wealthy or win in a competition, as did Sian Proctor, a member of Inspiration4 mission . But before spending thousands of dollars on space travel, here is one more fact you might want to consider.

Rocket launches are harmful to the environment in general. During the burning of rocket fuels, rocket engines release harmful gases and soot particles (also known as black carbon) into the upper atmosphere, resulting in ozone depletion. Think about this: in 2018 black-carbon-producing rockets emitted about the same amount of black carbon as the global aviation industry emits annually.

However, not all space companies use black carbon for fuel. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket has a liquid hydrogen-fuelled engine: hydrogen doesn’t emit carbon but simply turns into water vapor when burning.

The main reason why space tourism could be harmful to the environment is its potential popularity. With the rising amount of rocket launches the carbon footprint will only increase — Virgin Galactic alone aims to launch 400 of these flights annually. Meanwhile, the soot released by 1,000 space tourism flights could warm Antarctica by nearly 1°C !

Would you want to become a space tourist? Let us know your opinion on social media and share the article with your friends, if you enjoyed it! Also, the Best Mobile App Awards 2021 is going on right now, and we would very much appreciate it if you would vote for our Sky Tonight app . Simply tap "Vote for this app" in the upper part of the screen. No registration is required!

You Won’t Hear Much About the Next Chapter of Space Travel

Space tourism is getting less transparent, and more like traveling by private jet.

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Of all the high-flying tourism ventures spawned by space-obsessed billionaires, Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, offers perhaps the most unconventional approach. It doesn’t use big rockets or gumdrop-shaped capsules. Instead, an airplane takes off with a spacecraft strapped to its wing. The spacecraft, shaped like a plane itself, holds the paying customers and more pilots. When the airplane reaches a certain altitude, it releases the spacecraft. The spacecraft’s pilots then ignite its engine, and the vehicle soars straight up, to the fuzzy boundary that separates us from the rest of the universe, before gliding back down and landing on a runway.

The spaceplane experience is a stark contrast to Blue Origin’s suborbital jaunts and SpaceX’s orbital missions, but Virgin Galactic’s passengers still have a few surreal minutes of weightlessness, and they get to see the planet gleaming against the darkness of space. Those passengers have included the first former Olympian to reach space, as well as the first mother-daughter duo and, most recently, the first Pakistani .

In the midst of all that, Virgin Galactic clocked a first that raised some eyebrows: The company withheld the passenger list from the public before a takeoff last month, divulging the travelers’ names only after they had landed. The company never publicly explained its preflight secrecy. (Virgin Galactic did not respond to a request for comment.) Yesterday, Virgin Galactic announced its next flight, scheduled for November; the company kept one of the three listed passengers anonymous, saying only that the person is “of Franco-Italian nationality.”

Virgin is of course within its rights to withhold passenger names before takeoff. After all, airlines and railroads keep private the names of their customers. But Virgin Galactic’s choice to do so marks a subtle shift—the latest in U.S. spaceflight’s arc from a publicly funded national mission to private tourism. NASA, as a taxpayer-funded organization, has always had to provide the public with launch lists and livestreams. But the age of space tourism raises a host of questions: How much openness do space-tourism companies owe the public? How much privacy do they owe their customers? Before the Virgin flight returned home last month, it operated almost like a privately chartered plane, its movements known to relevant aviation agencies but its passengers’ names undisclosed to the public. Commercial spaceflight and air travel are still far from alike, but in this particular aspect, the space-tourism industry may be drifting toward its private-jet era.

Read: The new ‘right stuff’ is money and luck

In practice, the space-tourism industry is barely more than two years old, and it’s “still finding its norms,” says Carissa Christensen, a space consultant and the CEO of BryceTech, an analytics and engineering firm. The first passenger rosters were marquee news in 2021, when Branson and Jeff Bezos were racing to be the first to ride their own spacecraft , and Elon Musk’s SpaceX was working to send a quartet of private astronauts with zero spaceflight experience into orbit.

All three of their companies publicized, and even hyped, the passenger lists, in some cases months in advance. Wally Funk, an octogenarian aviator who had outperformed male candidates in astronaut tests during the 1960s but was kept out of the astronaut corps because she was a woman, flew alongside Bezos . Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman, paid for three other people to fly into orbit with him on SpaceX; all of them gave countless interviews before launch. And who can forget the hype ahead of William Shatner’s flight, and the Star Trek star’s unfiltered, emotional remarks after landing?

The rosters became less noteworthy as time went on: The customers were no longer memorable guests who got free rides, but simply very wealthy people who could afford the trips on their own. Last month’s temporarily secret Virgin Galactic fliers included a real-estate investor from Las Vegas, a South African entrepreneur, and a British engineer who founded a company that builds race cars. Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer and the executive director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for Air and Space Law, told me that she was mildly surprised by Virgin Galactic’s decision to withhold the passengers’ identities before takeoff, but that the decision did not strike her as inappropriate.

“From a paparazzi standpoint, if it’s Ashton Kutcher, the world’s gonna care a little bit more than if it’s Michelle Hanlon,” Hanlon said. (Kutcher did, in fact, purchase a Virgin Galactic ticket in 2012, but he later sold it back to the company after his wife and fellow actor, Mila Kunis, talked him out of going.) And from a legal standpoint, nothing inappropriate occurred, Hanlon said; there are no existing requirements for a private company to disclose passenger names. Space travelers must sign waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration outlining the risks associated with the activity, she said, but the companies they’re flying with are not required to provide the agency with a passenger list.

Read: Jeff Bezos knows who paid for him to go to space

Passenger names aren’t the only details of commercial spaceflight that are becoming more opaque. When SpaceX launched its first set of private astronauts, the company shared significantly less live footage of their experience in orbit than they did when NASA astronauts test-drove the capsule a year earlier. During its last two flights, Virgin Galactic decided not to provide a livestream, giving updates on social media instead.

Because there are no regulations, it’s difficult to say when the companies’ right to privacy becomes a concerning level of secrecy. NASA overshares when it comes to its astronauts and their mission, because the public—which funds the agency—expects it. Americans might also expect a good look at SpaceX customers who visit the International Space Station, which relies on billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and where private visitors share meals with government astronauts. But what about other kinds of SpaceX missions, which go into orbit without disembarking at any government-owned facility? The company developed its crewed launch services with significant investment from NASA, so virtually every SpaceX trip indirectly involves government money. That doesn’t necessarily mean SpaceX is obligated to share as the space agency does, even if people on the ground feel that it should.

Another major difference between NASA missions and private ones, of course, is that astronauts are at work, whereas many space tourists are presumably just having fun. Caryn Schenewerk, a consultant who specializes in commercial spaceflight at her firm CS Consulting, told me that she thinks commercial spaceflight will adopt the practices of other forms of adventure tourism. Take skydiving, for example: Schenewerk said that she has signed paperwork granting the skydiving company permission to use footage of her experience for its own purposes. “There’s some expectation of privacy on the individual’s behalf that then has to be actively waived for the company’s benefit,” she said.

The once-anonymous Virgin Galactic passengers on the September flight have since publicly shared their stories , basking in the awe of their experience. Christensen told me that most future tourists will likely do the same. “A big part of the fun is other people knowing that you’ve done it,” she said. Flying to space isn’t exactly something to be modest about: Fewer than 700 people have done it since human beings first achieved the feat, in the early 1960s, and we know all of their names. If Virgin’s new mystery passenger doesn’t reveal their name, they really will make history.

Read: Seeing Earth from space will change you

Many spacefarers—the Soviet cosmonauts who inhabited the first space station, the American astronauts who shuttled their way into orbit, the Chinese astronauts living in space right now, all of the people who have flown commercial—have spoken about the transformational wonder of seeing Earth from space, a phenomenon known as the overview effect . They reported that they better understood the reality of our beautiful, fragile planet, and that they felt a duty to share their impressions with people on the ground. Gene Cernan, one of the dozen men who walked on the lunar surface, once said, “If only everyone could relate to the beauty and the purposefulness of it … It wouldn’t bring a utopia to this planet for people to understand it all, but it might make a difference.” In this sense, for a space traveler to remain unknown forever would be a sort of anti–overview effect: Just as they may have the right to request some privacy, they have no obligation to bring the transcendent power of their journey back to Earth.

Three years ago, two NASA astronauts made a historic flight on a new SpaceX astronaut capsule. Ahead of the mission, I asked NASA what Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken were going to have for breakfast on the morning of the launch. It was a question with a long tradition in spacefaring history: During the Apollo days, the public was privy to the final Earth-bound meals of history-making astronauts. NASA officials balked, saying they couldn’t divulge that information for privacy reasons. But on the day of the launch, Hurley, as if to sate the space press corps, posted a picture of his steak and eggs on Twitter (as it was still known then).

Hurley and Behnken’s preflight hours seemed like fair game; after all, these men were government employees, doing their job on their assigned mission. But future passengers may decide that we have no business knowing their breakfast order—or even their name.

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The Private Companies Pioneering the (New) Space Race

It’s a brave new world for space travel..

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Three companies—Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX—are blazing their own separate paths into space tourism.

Courtesy of Blue Origin

Space travel is all extremes. The prices are high—the cheapest trips cost as much as the average home in the United States—and the minutes spent floating weightlessly, gaping at Earth’s thin blue line, can be few. But more and more people are venturing into space, and the business is booming.

Three space barons— Jeff Bezos , Richard Branson , and Elon Musk —are at the fore of the space travel industry. So far, their passengers represent a narrow slice of humanity: celebrities like Star Trek ’s William Shatner or uber-rich businesspeople like Jared Isaacman , who made his fortune on a payment-processing firm he started as a teenager. The days of sipping electric-blue cocktails on sleek space stations aren’t here for the masses just yet, but for those with the dream (and cash) for a jaunt to the nearest reaches of space, look to these companies.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the intention of making space travel cheaper, more accessible, and frequent.

Blue Origin

Prep: Two days of training include touring the New Shepard rocket, experiencing launch simulations, and learning to conduct oneself in zero gravity (no re-enacting scenes from The Matrix ).

Price: Bezos has kept the cost for rides under wraps. In an auction for its first crewed flight in July 2021, the winning bid was $28 million for a single rider.

Founded in 2000 by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin launches travelers on 11-minute excursions. Previous passengers include William Shatner, who was profoundly moved by the experience and marveled at the tenuous boundary between Earth and space. “This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin,” he told Bezos. “It would be so important for everybody to have that experience.”

The reusable New Shepard rocket takes travelers 62 miles above Earth. That’s just above the Kármán line—a theoretical boundary considered the start of space by the leading international aeronautical organization, the Féderátion Aéronautique Internationale , since the atmosphere there is too thin to support airplanes.

At the peak of the flight, passengers enjoy a few minutes of floating weightlessly while peering out their own windows (nearly 43 by 29 inches, the biggest on the market) before the capsule glides back down to the desert.

Virgin Galactic is considered to be one of the front runners in the space race after it flew one of its space planes in the outer atmosphere in 2018.

Photo by Mark Greenberg/Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic

Prep: A year of preparation culminates in several days of bonding and collaborating as a passenger team “to create a group that is fully equipped to enjoy themselves during spaceflight.” Passengers are also fitted for bespoke Under Armour space suits and boots.

Price: $450,000

British entrepreneur Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic offers an experience on its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane, which can function in Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. As with any flight, the journey starts on a runway. The spaceplane piggybacks on another plane to 50,000 feet before the rocket ignites and the craft ascends.

The 90-minute flight peaks at 53 miles: well below the Kármán line, but past the 50-mile-mark that NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration consider the start of space. (Initially, the SpaceShipTwo was intended to fly above the 62-mile-mark, but trouble with the motor design resulted in a model that isn’t powerful enough to go that high.) Passengers enjoy four weightless minutes before re-entering the lower atmosphere and gliding back down the runway.

Virgin Galactic highlights the “ overview effect ” as a perk of its cosmic services: the cognitive transformation often sparked by viewing Earth against the void of space. Many astronauts report intense emotion as the unique perspective reveals the fragility and connectedness of life on Earth. In 2019, Beth Moses , Virgin Galactic’s Chief Astronaut Officer, became the first woman to fly to space on a commercial vehicle. In July 2021, she made a second trip aboard the same vessel.

In 2021, SpaceX flew the space tourism industry’s first all-civilian crew into space.

Courtesy of SpaceX

Prep: To prepare for a three-day trip in orbit, one crew underwent six months of centrifuge spins and fighter jet flights, launch and re-entry rehearsals, and even climbed snowy Mount Rainier for team bonding.

Price: A reported $55 million

Led by tech magnate Elon Musk, SpaceX boasts the only tours into orbit. And they are much more exclusive. As of July 2022, only eight civilians—lucky individuals, wealthy businesspeople, and a retired astronaut among them—have orbited Earth with SpaceX, circling the planet every 90 minutes. For these tours, the company uses the same rocket, Falcon 9 , and gumdrop-shaped spacecraft, the Dragon , to shuttle NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Astronauts have said SpaceX’s ride brings longer, rougher g-forces, with the rocket thrusting about 4.5 times Earth’s gravity onto passengers.

The company has sent civilians on a three-day spin around Earth, while a handful of business executives had a two-week stay on the International Space Station (the latter trip was chartered by the company Axiom Space). In 2023, SpaceX will send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa on a trip around the moon.

On their orbiting stint in the 13-foot-wide Dragon , 357 miles above Earth, a four-person crew shared a toilet, took no showers, and slept buckled into the same seats they rode during launch. They ate cold meals of pizza, sandwiches, and bolognese. On the ISS trip, three civilians and their captain—a former astronaut—ate NASA’s freeze-dried meals. During their stay, which was extended due to bad weather for landing, the crew performed a variety of science experiments, like a regenerative medicine study for the Mayo Clinic on cardiac cells. Both journeys ended with a splash into the Atlantic Ocean.

Space tourism – 20 years in the making – is finally ready for launch

Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, Air University

Disclosure statement

Wendy Whitman Cobb is affiliated with the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Her views are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any of its affiliates.

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For most people, getting to the stars is nothing more than a dream. On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito achieved that lifelong goal – but he wasn’t a typical astronaut. Tito, a wealthy businessman, paid US$20 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to be the first tourist to visit the International Space Station. Only seven people have followed suit in the 20 years since, but that number is poised to double in the next 12 months alone.

NASA has long been hesitant to play host to space tourists , so Russia – looking for sources of money post-Cold War in the 1990s and 2000s – has been the only option available for those looking for this kind of extreme adventure. However, it seems the rise of private space companies is going to make it easier for regular people to experience space.

From my perspective as a space policy analyst , I see the beginning of an era in which more people can experience space. With companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin hoping to build a future for humanity in space, space tourism is a way to demonstrate both the safety and reliability of space travel to the general public.

The development of space tourism

Flights to space like Dennis Tito’s are expensive for a reason. A rocket must burn a lot of costly fuel to travel high and fast enough to enter Earth’s orbit.

Another cheaper possibility is a suborbital launch, with the rocket going high enough to reach the edge of space and coming right back down. While passengers on a suborbital trip experience weightlessness and incredible views, these launches are more accessible.

The difficulty and expense of either option has meant that, traditionally, only nation-states have been able to explore space. This began to change in the 1990s as a series of entrepreneurs entered the space arena. Three companies led by billionaire CEOs have emerged as the major players: Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX. Though none have taken paying, private customers to space, all anticipate doing so in the very near future.

British billionaire Richard Branson has built his brand on not just business but also his love of adventure. In pursuing space tourism, Branson has brought both of those to bear. He established Virgin Galactic after buying SpaceShipOne - a company that won the Ansari X-Prize by building the first reusable spaceship. Since then, Virgin Galactic has sought to design, build and fly a larger SpaceShipTwo that can carry up to six passengers in a suborbital flight.

The going has been harder than anticipated. While Branson predicted opening the business to tourists in 2009, Virgin Galactic has encountered some significant hurdles – including the death of a pilot in a crash in 2014 . After the crash, engineers found significant problems with the design of the vehicle, which required modifications.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, respective leaders of SpaceX and Blue Origin, began their own ventures in the early 2000s.

Musk, fearing that a catastrophe of some sort could leave Earth uninhabitable, was frustrated at the lack of progress in making humanity a multiplanetary species. He founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of first developing reusable launch technology to decrease the cost of getting to space. Since then, SpaceX has found success with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX’s ultimate goal is human settlement of Mars – sending paying customers to space is an intermediate step. Musk says he hopes to show that space travel can be done easily and that tourism might provide a revenue stream to support development of the larger, Mars-focused Starship system.

Bezos, inspired by the vision of physicist Gerard O’Neill , wants to expand humanity and industry not to Mars, but to space itself. Blue Origin , established in 2004, has proceeded slowly and quietly in also developing reusable rockets. Its New Shepard rocket, first successfully flown in 2015, will eventually offer tourists a suborbital trip to the edge of space, similar to Virgin Galactic’s. For Bezos, these launches represent an effort at making space travel routine, reliable and accessible to people as a first step to enabling further space exploration.

Outlook for the future

Now, SpaceX is the only option for someone looking to go into space and orbit the Earth. It currently has two tourist launches planned. The first is scheduled for as early as September 2021 , funded by billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman. The other trip, planned for 2022, is being organized by Axiom Space . These trips will be costly , at $55 million for the flight and a stay on the International Space Station. The high cost has led some to warn that space tourism – and private access to space more broadly – might reinforce inequality between rich and poor.

Blue Origin’s and Virgin Galactic’s suborbital trips are far more reasonable in cost, with both priced between $200,000 and $250,000 . Blue Origin appears to be the nearest to allowing paying customers on board, saying after a recent launch that crewed missions would be happening “soon.” Virgin Galactic continues to test SpaceShipTwo, but no specific timetable has been announced for tourist flights.

Though these prices are high, it is worth considering that Dennis Tito’s $20 million ticket in 2001 could pay for 100 flights on Blue Origin soon. The experience of viewing the Earth from space, though, may prove to be priceless for a whole new generation of space explorers.

[ Over 104,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today .]

An updated version of this article was published on May 7, 2021. Read it here .

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Want to be a space tourist? Here are 6 things to consider first

The industry of space tourism could exist in the future. Image:  Unsplash/NASA

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Stay up to date:.

• In July 2021, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos went up into space, accompanied by fellow passengers.
• These trips created vast amounts of media coverage and brand recognition for Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’ Blue Origin.
• This could indicate that a commercial space tourism industry is on the horizon.
• Before space trips become commercially available, important factors such as environmental and safety laws need to be considered.

It’s been a momentous month for space-faring billionaires. On July 11, British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson’s Unity “rocket-plane” flew him and five fellow passengers about 85 kilometres above Earth. And this week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard capsule reached an altitude of 106km , carrying Bezos, his brother, and the oldest and youngest people ever to reach such a height. Passengers on both flights experienced several minutes of weightlessness and took in breathtaking views of our beautiful and fragile Earth.

Both flights created an avalanche of media coverage and brand recognition for Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’s Blue Origin. There is renewed anticipation of a lucrative commercial space tourism industry that could eventually see thousands of paying passengers journey into space (or not quite into space, depending on your preferred level of pedantry).

This year marks 60 years since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. Since then, almost 600 trained astronauts have gone into outer space, but very few people have become space tourists.

The first, US engineer Dennis Tito, paid a reported US$20 million to spend six days orbiting Earth in the Russian section of the International Space Station in April 2001, after three months’ training at Russia’s Star City complex. He was followed by a handful of other very wealthy “orbital tourists”, most recently Cirque de Soleil founder Guy Laliberté in 2009, whose ticket reportedly cost US$35 million.

Unlike their predecessors, Branson’s and Bezos’ flights were suborbital – they didn’t reach the velocity needed to orbit Earth. Bezos’s entire flight lasted just over 10 minutes. Suborbital flights are much less technically complex, and in theory cheaper (although one seat on the New Shepard flight was auctioned for US$28 million ).

While they might quibble over billionaire bragging rights, there’s no denying that suborbital “space” flights have the potential to be less eye-wateringly expensive than going into orbital outer space and beyond.

But before you sign up – assuming you’re lucky enough to afford it – here are a few things to consider.

Where does space start, anyway?

Have you read, how many space launches does it take to have a serious climate impact, from space squid to saliva: what's inside nasa's cargo missions and why, the big space clean-up - and why it matters.

Despite assertions to the contrary , there is no legal definition of “outer space”, and thus no official boundary where airspace ends and outer space begins. In the past, the International Aeronautical Federation has looked to the von Karman line , but this does not coincide with the boundary of any of the atmosphere’s scientifically defined layers, and the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space , which deals with such issues, has not yet resolved the question.

Conveniently for Branson, 80km has been proposed by some experts as an appropriate boundary.

Outer space is undeniably influenced by Earthly geopolitics. Essentially, the larger space-faring countries see no need to legally define a boundary that would clearly demarcate the upper limits of their sovereignty.

Will you be an ‘astronaut’?

The 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty designates astronauts as “envoys of (hu)mankind in outer space”. Certainly, that seemed to be the case as the world watched the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing and prayed for a safe return of the stricken Apollo 13 capsule. However, the 1968 UN Rescue Agreement refers to “personnel of a spacecraft”, which may imply not everyone on board should be considered a fully fledged astronaut.

Of course, these legal niceties won’t deter space tourism companies from awarding “astronaut wings” to their passengers.

What laws apply when things go wrong?

The 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia shuttle disasters are stark reminders of the dangers of space travel. Human space travel has always involved determining acceptable levels of risk for trained astronauts. But commercial space tourism is different to state-sponsored space programs, and will need the highest possible safety standards.

Commercial space travel will also require a system of responsibility and liability, for cases in which a space tourist suffers injury, loss or damage.

Space tourists (or their families) can’t claim for compensation under the 1972 UN Liability Convention which, in terms of space, applies only to collisions between space objects such as satellites and space debris. While there may be scope to take legal action under national laws, it is likely space tourists will be asked to sign carefully worded waivers of liability.

The same is probably true of international air law , which applies to “aircraft” — a designation space tourism operators will understandably be keen to avoid.

Ultimately, we may need to develop a system of “aerospace law” to govern these suborbital flights as well as “transorbital” transport such as the keenly envisaged flights that might one day take passengers from Sydney to London in just a few hours.

What activities should be allowed in space?

The advent of space tourism will give rise to some interesting ethical questions. Should there be advertising billboards in space? What about casinos, or brothels? On what legal basis should these things be restricted?

How does tourism fit with the underlying philosophy of space law: that the exploration and use of outer space “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries”?

Will space tourism harm the environment?

Space tourism will inevitably put pressure on Earth’s environment – there are claims that space vehicles may one day become the world’s biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions. We will need to manage space traffic carefully to avoid disastrous collisions and steer clear of space debris .

If tourists go to the Moon, they may cause pollution or damage the heritage of earlier exploration, such as Neil Armstrong’s footprints .

Will tourism workers have to live in space?

If space tourism does become truly widespread, it will need infrastructure and perhaps even staff. People may end up living permanently in space settlements, perhaps having children who will be born as “space citizens”. What legal rights would someone have if they were born at a Moon base? Would they be subject to terrestrial laws, or some version of current international legal rules for outer space?

The World Economic Forum was the first to draw the world’s attention to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the current period of unprecedented change driven by rapid technological advances. Policies, norms and regulations have not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation, creating a growing need to fill this gap.

The Forum established the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network in 2017 to ensure that new and emerging technologies will help—not harm—humanity in the future. Headquartered in San Francisco, the network launched centres in China, India and Japan in 2018 and is rapidly establishing locally-run Affiliate Centres in many countries around the world.

The global network is working closely with partners from government, business, academia and civil society to co-design and pilot agile frameworks for governing new and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) , autonomous vehicles , blockchain , data policy , digital trade , drones , internet of things (IoT) , precision medicine and environmental innovations .

Learn more about the groundbreaking work that the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network is doing to prepare us for the future.

Want to help us shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Contact us to find out how you can become a member or partner.

These are obviously questions for the future. But given the excitement generated by the brief journeys of a couple of wealthy entrepreneurs, we should start contemplating them now. Outer space is the new frontier, but it is not — and must not — be a lawless one.

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Space Tourism Is Here: Booking a Trip to the Final Frontier

The next era of space exploration and innovation is here — and we're all invited. Space tourism is officially taking flight, and it might just save the Earth.

In July 2021, we watched as Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos took to the skies in a giant leap for the space tourism industry, but their launches to the edge of space weren't timed particularly well. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and climate emergency, two billionaires taking joy rides to space may not have been good optics, but don't underestimate what happened — and how important it could be for the future of humanity.

With the first crewed launches of Virgin Galactic's supersonic space plane and Blue Origin's reusable rocket, a world of commercial space travel is taking its first step. Both companies plan to begin regular, scheduled trips for paying space tourists in the near future, but their visions stretch back many years to the beginning of human spaceflight.

The Space Race: Then and Now

Bezos's Blue Origin chose an auspicious day to send its first crew to space. July 20, 2021 was exactly 52 years after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. But that wasn't the only major space travel anniversary celebrated in 2021.

April 12 was the 60th anniversary of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to not only reach space, but also go into orbit around Earth. Meanwhile, May 5 saw the 60th anniversary of NASA's Freedom 7 mission, which launched Alan Shepard on a suborbital flight that lasted 15 minutes. He reached an altitude of 101 miles to become the first American in space before his capsule parachuted to splashdown in the ocean.

The name of Blue Origin's New Shepard launch system is no coincidence. Its mission profile is almost identical to America's inaugural 1961 spaceflight, save for billionaire-grade comfy seats and large windows. From Launch Site One near Van Horn in the West Texas desert, that rocket fires a capsule containing up to six people (but no pilot) into space, which then parachutes down 15 minutes later.

The Virgin Galactic experience is different. Its supersonic rocket-powered spaceplane SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity seats six passengers and two highly trained pilots. It takes off on a runway from Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, while strapped to a mothership. At 52,000 feet, it detaches and burns its rocket engine for one minute to reach Mach 3 speeds and touch the edge of space. After a few minutes of weightlessness (and a chance for passengers to see the curvature of Earth against the blackness of space), it glides back to land on a runway.

The Price for a Ticket to Space

These short trips cost between $250,000 and $500,000, but in April 2022, a truly out-of-this-world private trip to space launched with an even more astronomical price tag. It came from the other billionaire in the space tourism bubble: Elon Musk. Axiom Mission 1 saw his company, SpaceX, launch four private astronauts on behalf of Houston-based space tourism company Axiom Space. An American real estate investor, a Canadian investor, a former Israeli Air Force pilot, and a former NASA astronaut took an incredible orbital mission in its Crew Dragon spacecraft. 

At $55 million per ticket, the trip to the International Space Station represented ultra-aspirational space tourism of the highest order. "They [did] what real astronauts do, and I don't think it's an accident that Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin did their flights before Axiom's mission,” says Christina Korp, cofounder of  Space for a Better World . Axiom Space intends to launch a private space station — the first "space hotel" — as early as 2025 to give space tourists somewhere to visit.

The Future of Space Tourism — and of Our Planet

Musk talks of Mars colonies and humanity spreading out into the cosmos, but since 2012, SpaceX has made a lot of money from NASA contracts to launch supplies to the ISS. In the summer of 2020, it began ferrying NASA astronauts there, too. SpaceX's Starship — currently being tested — is slated to land two NASA astronauts, the first woman and the next man, on the moon as early as 2025.

You see, space tourism is just a sideshow to a bigger and more worthy goal of saving the planet. Sometime in the next few years, Blue Origin plans to test its reusable New Glenn rocket — named after John Glenn, who, in 1962, became the first American to orbit the Earth — which will be able to take cargo and astronauts into orbit. Bezos has said he thinks we need to go to space to save Earth, specifically by protecting the planet from pollution by moving heavy industry into space. That can only happen when space travel is safe, scheduled, and affordable. Space tourism will help create a competitive space economy, just as mass tourism has lowered the cost of flying.

Similarly, Branson's aim is to increase access to space. "We are at the vanguard of a new space age…Our mission is to make space more accessible to all," he said after his inaugural flight. A microgravity experiment was on board that first flight in July 2021, with similar plans for all subsequent trips.

The scientific spin-offs for all of us down on Earth are currently unknown, but the space community has an incredible track record when it comes to innovation. "Clean energy as solar power is from the space program," says Korp. "Solar panels were invented to power satellites and refined to power spacecraft." Cue GPS, weather forecasting, telecommunications, and even internet access. There are also fleets of satellites large and small that observe how our planet is behaving and changing. "It's the space industry that's monitoring climate change, tracking hurricanes, and learning how to survive in the extreme environment of space — including experiments to grow food with almost no water, for example," says Korp. Every single space mission, including suborbital and even zero-gravity flights, have environmental experiments on board as default.

"This is not about escaping Earth," said Bezos after the flight. "The whole point is, this is the only good planet in the solar system and we have to take care of it." Bezos wants to scale up into affordable space travel. That will enable long-term, commercial projects that ultimately may help prevent further climate change, or at least help us cope with its consequences.

However, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX won't be the only way to reach space. Russian space agency Roscosmos is expected to take "citizen space explorers" to the ISS soon, but the most affordable way to get "black sky time" may be with Space Perspective , which will launch a pressurized capsule propelled by a high-performance space balloon.

The six-hour flight costs $125,000 per person and is slated to launch from Space Coast Spaceport in Florida in 2024 (the first flight is already fully booked, but you can put your name on a waiting list for any future expeditions). "Unlike short-lived, adrenaline-fueled moments of weightlessness, Space Perspective flights bring you space calm," says Jane Poynter, founder, co-CEO, and CXO of Space Perspective. The flights on Spaceship Neptune involve a gentle ascent at just 12 miles per hour for a six-hour tour of Earth's biosphere, culminating in a view of our beautiful planet from space.

Space tourism is here at last. Instagram had better get ready for "Earth selfies."

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Space Tourism: How to Visit Space as a Tourist

Last updated: August 28, 2023 . Written by Laurence Norah - 4 Comments

Despite the name of this blog, I have been distressingly earth bound for all of my years thus far. Given recent developments in space exploration technology though, hope is not yet lost for the dream of going into space as a tourist – without having to shell out the millions of dollars that past tourists have paid!

In today’s post, I’m going to talk about a few things. I’m going to cover where space travel & exploration is today.

I’m going to talk about what options we have now, and may have in the future, for getting into space as a tourist. And I’m also going to cover a few ways those of us stuck on Earth without access to a giant pile of cash can still get our space fix around the world!

Table of Contents:

The State of Space Travel as a Tourist in 2023

Huge strides are happening right now in space exploration, particularly with private companies looking at opening up space to your average person. Admittedly, right now, space tourism isn’t exactly accessible.

Up to 2009, only 7 people made it into space as tourists, all travelling with the Russian Space Agency, and all paying in excess of USD $20 million.

These weren’t exactly hop-on hop-off trips either, with the participants undergoing months of training, and many of them actively running their own experiments in space. So to call them space tourists is perhaps a bit of a misnomer.

However, things have now changed, and trips into space are becoming more affordable. Admittedly, they aren’t exactly “budget”, but they are less than $20 million a go.

So what’s changed?

Well, put simply, private investment. Whilst massive government organisations like NASA , the Russian Space Agency and the European Space Agency are always researching and expanding their space exploration efforts, their focus isn’t exactly on getting folks like you and me into space – at least not in the near term. Their focus is on long term scientifically focused exploration missions, with perhaps the most exciting being NASA’s Journey to Mars .

Other organisations though, see the potential for space based tourism as a way to generate funds and publicity for their projects. There are three main players in the space tourism business right now – Virgin Galactic , SpaceX and Blue Origin .

Let’s take a look at the main players with whom you have a real chance of getting into space within the next few years.

How to Go To Space As A Tourist

Other than flagging down a passing UFO Ford Prefect style, or signing up to be an astronaut with a government agency, getting into space is a bit tricky. But that’s all changing, and these are the companies with whom you are most likely to be able to travel into space.

1. Virgin Galactic

Part of the Virgin Group headed up by Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic currently offers sub-orbital flights to paying passengers aboard their SpaceShipTwo and SpaceShipThree craft.

Sub-orbital means that you’re not high enough to actually orbit the earth, but as the goal you do pass the 100km line that marks the edge of space, you will technically be in space, and also experience weightlessness. Hurrah!

The good news is that as of June 2023, commercial space flights have actually commenced. Trips are scheduled to go monthly, and you can now buy tickets for a voyage into space with Virgin Galactic. They are currently on sale for $450,000.

Admittedly, $450,000 USD isn’t exactly small change, but it’s a lot less expensive than the $20 million that previous space travellers have paid. For your money, you get three days of training at Spaceport America in New Mexico, a flight into space, a somewhat incredible view and a period of weightlessness. Not too bad.

2. Blue Origin

Owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin is a private company which initially appeared to be focusing on sub-orbital flight, much like Virgin Galactic.

Unlike Virgin Galactic though, which uses a combination of a normal plane and a rocket plane to achieve the necessary space altitude, Blue Origin are using more conventional rocket technology, with a focus on re-usable components that cut the cost of launches.

Other than the spacecraft, the experience is largely the same – a sub-orbital flight that comprises a few days of training in Texas, a journey lasting around 11 minutes to up beyond the 100km line, weightlessness and some incredible views.

The technology to do this will look familiar to any fans of existing space flight technologies, including the capsule that returns to Earth by parachute, meaning that there are fewer technical hurdles to overcome.

As of 2021, flights have commenced on the New Shepherd, with Jeff Bezos being the first into space. The ticket for the first commercially available seat in the July 2021 launch was auctioned off for a cool $28 million.

Since that launch, there have been a number of flights with paying customers.

Regular pricing isn’t set, although it’s currently rumored to be around $1 million per seat. A timeframe for general availability of commercial flights isn’t yet known. You can sign up to be kept informed and updated however.

Perhaps even more excitingly than the New Shepherd program is its successor – the New Glenn program. This should offer longer duration, possibly even orbital flights, although details are currently sparse on the ground, with operations aimed to launch in late 2024. We do know however that priority on these trips will be given to New Shepherd customers.

Last in our trio of serious contenders for firms that will take your money and send you into space in the next few years is SpaceX .

SpaceX is owned by Elon Musk, who is particularly famous for being the CEO and co-founder of Tesla Inc, the electric car and battery manufacturer, amongst other things.

SpaceX largely focuses on commercial launch capabilities, with a particular focus on reusable rocket technologies that bring down the cost of putting payloads into orbit.

They’ve been hugely successful in this field, with multiple achievements, including being the first privately funded company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft.

They were also the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station, and have since flown many missions to the ISS.

Whilst the majority of their work is on commercial and government contracts for putting things like satellites into orbit, some recent developments have put SpaceX firmly on the space tourism map.

First, in 2017 they announced that they had been contracted by two private individuals who want to go on a trip around the moon. This was originally due to launch in 2018, but has been postponed until at least 2024. It will be by far the most ambitious space tourism endeavor to date by any company, and you can read more about the project here .

SpaceX are also starting to sell tickets on their Crew Dragon capsule, which is the launch system NASA is using to shuttle astronauts to the ISS. These are not generally available, but a 3-day mission consisting entirely of tourists took place in 2021, with further missions expected. These are still priced in the tens of millions of dollars though, so don’t bank on these becoming affordable for a while to come.

Next, SpaceX is actively working on technology to colonise Mars, with a lofty goal of setting up a permanent colony on the red planet, home to over a million people, within the next 100 years.

Whilst the current estimate of cost for such a ride is in the region of $10 billion USD per person, SpaceX is aiming to bring that down to $100,000 through the development of their Interplanetary Transport System . This won’t happen in the near-term, but by the end of the century tourism to Mars might be a real possibility, with lunar and earth-orbital flights the norm by then.

4. Other Contenders

So those are the main players who, in my opinion, have the most realistic chances of taking you to space in the coming decade. But they aren’t the only players in the space tourism arena! Here are a few others to be aware of who might give you a chance of getting off Planet Earth.

Bigelow Aerospace: Bigelow Aerospace are actually a pretty major name when it comes to space technology, and if you ever happen to find yourself in a hotel on the moon or floating around the Earth, it’s likely going to be inside one of their inflatable habitats.

This isn’t theoretical either, they’ve got an inflatable capsule attached to the International Space Station already undergoing feasibility testing. Owner Robert Bigelow made his fortune in hotels, and he sees no reason why we can’t have them in space too.

Space Perspective: Space Perspective are taking a slightly different approach to everyone else, in that their route to space is to fly passengers 100,000ft above the ground in capsule carried aloft by a gigantic hydrogen filled balloon.

Ok, so 100,000ft isn’t exactly space, but it is high enough to see the curvature of the earth. It’s likely to be a more sedate and relaxed experience as well, compared to firing yourself into space on some sort of rocket at least. And whilst experiencing zero-gee isn’t going to be on the cards, you should be able to enjoy the views from the wraparound windows whilst enjoying a tipple from the on-board bar!

Tickets for 2024 flights have already sold out, but you can book for 2025 at a cost of $125,000 per person.

Boeing: Boeing are currently under contract with NASA to build a crew transport vehicle that would be compatible with a number of rocket systems, primarily for the purpose of shuttling astronauts to the ISS. It was originally due to start those flights in late 2018. However, testing did not start until late 2019, and the current timetable for crewed flights is now 2023.

As part of their contract, this CST-100 Starliner was specified to include one seat specifically for the purposes of space tourism , allowing one passenger to just tag along for the ride as it were. For a price, naturally. That price is currently unknown, although the original goal was to have it price competitive with the Russian Space Agency, so don’t expect it to come under the tens of millions mark!

Mars One: Mars One was an organisation with a goal of establishing a permanent human colony on Mars by the year 2035. Announced in 2012, it encouraged members of the public to sign up for the one-way mission, which resulted in over 200,000 applicants. That was whittled down to 100, and then a final 24 candidates.

Unfortunately, the project was dogged by criticism, particularly around the technical and financial feasibility of the plan. Finally, Mars One entered administration in 2019.

The Best Space Sights and Activities on Earth

Ok, so based on all the above, you’re probably realising that space is still a pretty tough place to get to right now, and even over the next few years it’s still going to be pretty darn expensive for a fairly brief jaunt.

Don’t fret though. Planet Earth is a pretty cool place, and there are a lot of space-related activities you can take part in without re-mortgaging your house and strapping yourself to a rocket.

Here are a few places you can learn about space and space travel in the meantime! Let’s look at these.

1. Active Spaceports

Whilst you might not get into space right now, you can still visit a spaceport and dream of the future! I’ve picked three spaceports for you to think about visiting.

Spaceport America, USA. Set in the high New Mexican desert, Spaceport America is the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport, meaning it’s designed for commercial users. Yes, people like you and me. It’s the home base of Virgin Galactic, and is where that company will be operating from when they finally launch their space tourism flights. SpaceX also conduct some of their testing here. Unfortunately, you still can’t board a space trip here, but it’s a worthwhile place to visit, if only to get a tantalising glimpse of a possible future.

Kennedy Space Center, USA. Found in Florida, Kennedy Space Center is the main launch pad for NASA’s operations, and is where Apollo and Space shuttle launches took place. It’s a massive facility, spanning 144,000 acres. There’s a visitor centre on site, where you can learn all about NASA and it’s space operations, see an actual space shuttle and even experience a simulated space shuttle launch. Kennedy Space Center is still very much an active launch site, and you can also come here to watch rockets blast off into space – see their website for the launch schedule .

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. One of the world’s most famous spaceports, and certainly the oldest and largest, Baikonur Cosmodrome is where the majority of Russia’s space program has operated from, including the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. It’s still very active, and you can in theory visit, however prices are steep for a one day tour ($700+), and can only be arranged via a specialist tour operator in a complex process that needs to be booked weeks in advance.

2. Space Museums

As well as active space ports, there are a lot of museums around the world dedicated to sharing man’s activities in space. Here are a few of the best.

Space Center Houston, USA. The official visitor centre for NASA’s center for human spaceflight activities, Space Center Houston is an excellent place to come and learn all about NASA’s efforts around getting people into space. It has a number of artifacts from our explorations to date, including a lunar module replica and various actual capsules that have been into space. Tip – if you’re visiting a few sights in Houston, you can save money by investing in a CityPASS card which will get you into the Space Center as well as a number of other attractions in the city.

New Mexico Museum of Space History, USA. Found in Alamogordo in southern New Mexico, the five storey New Mexico Museum of Space History is full of information about man’s efforts to get into space, with everything from information on early rocket technology through to more modern day exhibits including a space shuttle landing simulator. It’s also home to the International Hall of Space Fame, a planetarium, and offers fantastic views across the White Sands National Monument.

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum , USA . Found in Washington, D.C., this enormous museum is home to the world’s largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft in the world, including the Apollo 11 module and clothing worn by astronauts. With over 60,000 objects on display, you won’t run out of things to look at!

The National Space Centre, UK. Both a museum and an educational resource, the National Space Center in Leicester, UK, is home to six interactive galleries and the UK’s largest planetarium. A highlight though is the 42 metre high Rocket Tower , which houses a number of upright rockets, really giving you a feel for the enormity of these machines.

The U.S. Space and Rocket Center. Found in Huntsville, Alabama, right next door to NASA Marshall. The U.S. Space and Rocket Center has loads of information on the history of space flight, including two full size Saturn V rockets! This is also where you can attend Space Camp , a hands-on multi day training program for all ages, which will take you through a range of training similar to that which real astronauts do!

3. Space Themed Sights

We may be currently fairly stuck on the planet, but that doesn’t mean we’re not still hurtling through space, a small rock in a vast galaxy. Here are a few ways to help remind ourselves that there’s more out there than our horizon.

Meteor Craters. On our journey through space we regularly bump into errant lumps of space debris – around 100 tons a day in fact. Most often these lumps are so small (dust-specks really) that they just burn up in our atmosphere, creating beautiful shooting stars. However, anything larger than a marble has a chance of making to earth, although there are a lot of factors at work.

According to NASA , it’s the lumps that are around the size of a football field and up that make the most impact, and one of these hits us every couple of thousand of years. They can cause significant damage and leave a lasting impact. Two worth mentioning that you can visit are the aptly named “ Meteor Crater ” in Arizona, USA, and the Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater in Western Australia. Both of these are around a kilometre in diameter, meaning you can see the whole structure with the naked eye and really get a feel for the force required to create such a hole. Of course you can also find smaller ones all over the world.

Star Gazing. You might not be able to get to the stars, but that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate them. I always find that just lying back and staring into the vastness of space from a really dark location is a very powerful experience. You need to be somewhere far away from light pollution to get the best views of the night sky – there are dark sky preserves (and even festivals !) where you can get a great view, otherwise, head as far away from the lights as you can and just look up.

4. Giant Telescopes

How about if you can’t get into space, you try just looking at it through a really big magnifying glass and pretend you’re there? It might be as close as you can currently get to space for free, whilst also being wowed by humanities technological accomplishments. Below are four locations around the world where you can learn all about the art of looking into space. Of course, there are many more sites around the world and you can find a list of some of the major telescopes here although not all can be visited by the public.

The Very Large Array, USA. Far out in the New Mexico wilderness, the Very Large Array is one of the world’s largest and most impressive radio telescopes. Unlike an optical telescope, which look at visible light waves, a radio telescope looks at radio waves, and from that we can learn all sorts of things from how black holes are formed through to the creation of the universe itself. These radio waves require a very large telescope, which is why the VLA is actually made up of 27 dishes, which work together to capture radio waves. There’s a small visitor centre and self-guided walking trail, and there are guided tours on the first Saturday of the month. See the official website for more details.

Jodrell Bank, UK. If you’re in the UK , then a trip to Jodrell Bank is a good option for viewing impressively large radio telescopes. In fact, Jodrell Bank is home to the world’s third largest steerable radio telescope, as well as a number of other active telescopes. There’s a visitor centre where you can learn all about the telescopes, and all sorts of other space-related things.

The Very Large Telescope, Chile. Way up high in the mountains of Chile is the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory – the aptly named “ Very Large Telescope ”. Operated by the European Southern Observatory, this is the most impressive optical instrument in the world to date, consisting of four main mirrors that are over eight meters in diameter, as well as four 1.8m diameter mirrors. These work together to create a final image, and the telescope is powerful enough that it would be able to make out a cars headlights on the moon. It’s fairly remote, what with it being on a mountain top in Chile, but you can visit – check here for more information on tours.

Green Bank Observatory, USA – At time of writing, Green Bank Observatory is home to the worlds largest steerable radio telescope, the Green Bank Telescope. Constructed in 2001, it’s one of the newest US telescopes, and with a total collecting area of 2.3 acres, is certainly impressive to behold. You can take a tour of the observatory, and there are also weekly and monthly events at the site.

5. Extra-terrestrial spots

If you’re really desperate to get off planet, you might want to frequent a location which has a history of extra-terrestrial activity such as UFO sightings. Whilst E.T. is yet to make formal contact, who knows, you might get lucky and have the chance to hop on a passing spaceship!

  Roswell, USA. If you want to learn about aliens, then the town of Roswell in New Mexico has definitely got to be on your list. It became famous as the alleged site of a huge government cover-up of a supposed alien spaceship crash at a nearby ranch property, and the town has since embraced it’s position as the world’s most famous UFO hotspot. There are a number of alien themed attractions here – we’d recommend visiting the Roswell UFO museum as a good starting point.

El Enladrillado, Chile. Central Chile is well known as a UFO spotting hotzone. So much so in fact, that the country’s national tourism board established a UFO trail, a 30km long designated trail in the Andes mountains that centres around the town of San Clemente. This is definitely a good place to come to spot UFO’s, although the national tourism authority is keen to stress that a sighting isn’t guaranteed.

Nullabor Plain, Australia. When I was travelling in Australia, I had a memorable evening out in the outback on the vast Nullabor Plain with a chap who was convinced he was regularly visited by aliens. He might have been on to something of course, with this region of Australia being particularly famous for UFO sightings. And if you don’t see a UFO, fear not, the star gazing here is pretty epic too!

HR Giger Museum, Switzerland. If you prefer your aliens of the fantastical science fiction type, then a visit to the HR Giger museum in Gruyères, Switzerland, should definitely be on your list. It’s home a large collection of works by Swiss artists HR Giger, who famously created the monsters from the sci-fi classic horror movie Alien (and its sequels). Definitely one for the sci-fi fans.

Further Reading for your Space Trip

Well, that was a lot about space. Hopefully you’ve learnt a bit about your options for getting into space as a tourist, as well as some slightly more cost-effective ways to get your space fix on! Here are a few resources that you might find useful.

• Our favourite sights along the New Mexico Space Trail , USA. Plus a guide to attending the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta if you’re in New Mexico.
• Our guide to visiting Jasper National Park for their annual Dark Sky Festival
• A guide to attending Space Camp USA , as well as visiting the U.S Space and Rocket Center
• Official websites for Virgin Galactic , Blue Origin and SpaceX , for when you’ve saved up enough for that ticket to space
• The NASA Instagram feed , for mind blowing space images
• John Glenn’s memoir, to give you an insight into what it was like to be the first American to orbit the earth.
• Chris Hadfield’s book “ An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth ”, helping you understand how to make the impossible a reality, which seems like a good place to end this post!

Well, that was a lot to write about space travel and space tourism! We’re not quite there yet, but with the pace of developments I see no reason why, in the coming years and decades, that I won’t finally be able to realise my dream of heading up into space for real. Let me know in the comments if heading into space is a dream of yours!

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Lynn Magnuson says

17th February 2024 at 8:16 am

Traveling into space is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a child. I remember sitting in class and I think it was the third grade and watching Alan Shepard blast off. I knew at that point that someday I wanted to do the same thing. It hasn’t happened yet, but as time goes by the chance to do so, becomes more and more a possibility. I hope someday I do get the chance.

I love your article. Very well written and very informative. Keep up the great writing. That’s another thing I share a passion for. Writing

Laurence Norah says

20th February 2024 at 1:45 am

I’m right there with you! I really hope you get the chance to get into space some day soon. It’s definitely getting closer as a possibility 🙂

Safe travels, be they earthbound or not!

roshmand says

2nd July 2023 at 6:57 pm

amazing poat. thanks

4th July 2023 at 9:39 am

thank you very much 🙂

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Everything You Need to Know About Space Tourism Right Now

Your next travel splurge could be a flight to space

Virgin Galactic vehicle SpaceShipTwo on its first glide flight on October 10, 2010 over Mojave in California. (Virgin Galactic / Getty Images)

While 2020 has been an abysmal year on many counts, there’s one industry that’s thriving: space exploration. Within the first eight months of the year, we’ve seen the successful launches of three Mars missions, promising tests of new rockets, and the return of crewed spaceflight to U.S. soil—aboard a privately built spacecraft, no less! But we’re also getting much closer to the launch of the space tourism industry, meaning your dream of becoming an astronaut could become reality quite soon. We’re still a little ways away from regular flights into space for paying customers, but here are all the developments you need to know about.

The History of Space Tourism

Traveling to space has long been the domain of professional astronauts, not ordinary citizens. But that all changed when American entrepreneur Dennis Tito flew to space in 2001 with space tourism company Space Adventures, who organized the trip with Russian space agency Roscosmos. Tito was the first of only seven true “space tourists,” each of whom traveled to the International Space Station (ISS) via Roscosmos's Soyuz spacecraft for about a weeklong stay—or for two separate weeklong stays, in the case of one space traveler—for a reported cost between $20 million to $35 million per trip (plus months of training). The final space tourism excursion was made by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté in 2009, after which Roscosmos had to end touristic flights: when NASA retired its space shuttle program in 2011, each seat on its Soyuz spacecraft needed to be reserved for crews heading to the ISS, not tourists. Since then, space tourism has been halted.

Nearly There: Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic

The issue with Space Adventure’s program is that it relies on other operators for transportation, which limits its access to space. But the next wave of private spaceflight companies have been developing their own vehicles to propel clients into weightlessness. The two frontrunners in the space tourism race are Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, both of which are in advanced testing phases—Virgin Galactic has even opened ticket sales already, with more than 600 passengers booked. While both aerospace companies will provide their clients with suborbital trips into space, they’ll do so in entirely different fashions.

Blue Origin

Blue Origin plans to send tourists to space in its New Shepard vehicle, named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard, from its launch site in West Texas. New Shepard, which is an entirely autonomous craft that doesn’t need a human pilot, is similar to Roscosmos’s Soyuz and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicles in that its six passengers will be housed in a capsule and vertically launched into space via a rocket.

After a day of training, passengers will get to experience a launch just as professional astronauts do: they’ll feel the intense G-forces pressing down on them as the rocket shuttles them to an altitude of approximately 62 miles, which is widely accepted as the boundary of space. When the engines cut off, passengers will be weightless, and they’re free to float about the capsule, taking in the views of the planet and of the darkness of space through the capsule’s large windows. After a few minutes, the capsule will fall back to Earth under parachutes. All in, the trip lasts just 11 minutes—it’s a pretty short flight considering tickets will likely cost about $250,000. 

Blue Origin has successfully launched New Shepard on 12 un-crewed test flights since 2015, but it’ll need to get humans up into space before it’ll be certified to start carrying paying customers. The company originally hoped to launch a crewed test flight in 2019; however, it still has not done so, nor has it announced a new timeline for the test.

Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic, on the other hand, will fly passengers to space aboard a winged vehicle called SpaceShipTwo , which bears similarities to NASA’s space shuttle. But whereas the shuttle launched vertically via a rocket, SpaceShipTwo is launched horizontally. The vehicle, which seats six passengers plus two pilots, takes off from a runway like a regular plane via its carrier aircraft called WhiteKnightTwo. Virgin Galactic currently launches from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, but it will also launch from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

After takeoff, WhiteKnightTwo ascends to 50,000 feet, after which SpaceShipTwo is released, and its rocket-powered engines kick in to bring it all the way to a maximum altitude of roughly 68 miles. As with Blue Origin’s New Shepard, passengers will enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth, but instead of a parachute landing, SpaceShipTwo will land on a runway like a plane—which is also how the space shuttle landed. Total run time: between two and three hours in flight, plus two-and-a-half days of training, with a price tag of $250,000.

Virgin Galactic has been conducting test flights since 2010, but progress has been a bit slow—and deadly. In 2014, a test pilot was killed after a SpaceShipTwo vehicle broke apart during a flight, primarily due to pilot error. Testing resumed in 2016 and is ongoing, with no official word on when commercial operations will begin.

Other Companies Dreaming Big

Of all the space tourism operations out there, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are by far the closest to launching passengers. (Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has already successfully launched NASA astronauts into space, is not focusing on tourism, though it will provide lifts for third-party companies.) But coming in hot on their heels is Boeing, whose Starliner vehicle is being developed for NASA's Commercial Crew Program; its contract, however, allows for tourists to potentially join flights. 

The other viable space tourism companies on the horizon are not developing their own vehicles, rather, they plan on hitching rides with other providers. Space Adventures is still in the game, having entered a partnership with SpaceX to fly passengers on Crew Dragon as soon as next year. It’s also revived its tourism operations with Roscosmos: two tourists are booked on a trip to the ISS in 2023. Another company, Axiom Space, plans on taking passengers to the ISS via SpaceX’s Crew Dragon as soon as 2021, before launching its own private space station by the end of the decade. Similarly, Orion Span has announced its intentions to launch its Aurora Space Station in 2021, though construction on the project has yet to begin.

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U.S. public opinion on which private space companies are leading the space race 2021

Public opinion on which space companies are leading the private sector's push into space in the United States as of December 2021

U.S. opinion on which private space companies are leading the space race 2021, by age

Public opinion on which space companies are leading the private sector's push into space in the United States as of December 2021, by generation

Share of U.S. adults that believe space travel should be accessible to everyone 2021

Share of adults that believe space travel should be accessible to everyone and not just those that can afford the costs in the United States as of September 2021

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Share of the public that believe private companies focused on space exploration will make a profit in the next 10 years in the United States as of December 2021

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Share of adults that want to travel to space if money was not an issue in the United States as of September 2021, by gender

Share of the U.S. public who would go to the moon if money was not a factor 2021

Share of the public that would go to the moon as a tourist if money was not a factor in the United States as of December 2021

Share of the U.S. public who would go to the moon in 2021, by generation

Share of the public that would go to the moon as a tourist if money was not a factor in the United States as of December 2021, by generation

Share of the U.S. public who would go to the moon in 2021, by gender

Share of the public that would go to the moon as a tourist if money was not a factor in the United States as of December 2021, by gender

Share of U.S. adults who would travel to the moon 2021, by age

Share of adults that would travel to the moon in the United States as of May 2021, by age

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Share of adults that would spend more than 100 thousand U.S. dollars to travel to space in the United States as of September 2021

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Blue Origin completes latest space tourism flight successfully

Blue Origin flew its latest group of six thrill-seekers to the edge of space and back again Thursday, including the youngest-ever woman to complete the feat.

Mission NS-26 marked the eighth human spaceflight for the company, founded by Jeff Bezos, as it presses ahead in the emerging suborbital tourism market.

Karsen Kitchen, a 21-year-old senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, became the youngest woman ever to cross the Karman Line, the internationally recognized boundary marking the edge of space, 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the Earth's surface.

Blue Origin's small New Shepard rocket blasted off at 8:00 am local time (1300 GMT) from the company's Launch Site One base in west Texas.

After liftoff, the sleek and spacious capsule separated from its booster, which boasts zero carbon emissions, before the rocket performed a precise vertical landing.

As the spaceship soared beyond the Karman Line, passengers had the chance to marvel at the Earth's curvature and unbuckle their seatbelts to float during a few minutes of weightlessness.

"Being there in the darkness of space... there's no way to talk about how impressive that is," said Rob Ferl, a NASA-funded researcher who conducted an experiment during the flight.

The capsule then reentered the atmosphere, deploying its parachutes for a desert landing near the launch site. The total flight time is typically around 10 to 11 minutes.

Blue Origin does not publicly disclose the cost of its tickets, but prices are believed to vary significantly based on the individual selected, their net worth, and the social capital they bring to the company.

The first seat sold in a 2021 charity auction went for $28 million, but notable guests like Star Trek actor William Shatner have flown on Blue Origin flights for free. Others have reported paying several hundred thousand dollars.

Blue Origin's main competitor in the suborbital space market, Virgin Galactic, is currently on a two-year pause from commercial operations as it upgrades its fleet.

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Everything you need to know about space tourism

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News & features, winter center, news / astronomy, blue origin successfully completes 8th crewed new shepard space tourism flight.

By Don Jacobson, UPI

Published Aug 30, 2024 11:51 AM PDT | Updated Aug 30, 2024 12:21 PM PDT

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The crew of Blue Origin's NS-26 mission is pictured during a training session prior to Thursday's successful suborbital flight -- the eighth human flight and 26th overall in the space tourism company's New Shepard program. (Photo courtesy Blue Origin)

Aug. 29 (UPI) --  Jeff Bezos ' space tourism venture  Blue Origin  on Thursday successfully completed its eighth human suborbital spaceflight and the 26th flight in its New Shepard program.

A crew including Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen and Ephraim Rabin  touched down  in the reusable RSS First Step capsule at Blue Origin's Corn Ranch spaceport in West Texas at 9:07 a.m. EDT, 12 minutes after takeoff.

During the flight, the crew of  the NS-26 mission  reached a maximum altitude of about 341,000 feet and experienced weightlessness for about 1 minute.

The company noted that, at age 21, Kitchen made history Thursday as the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line -- the boundary separating Earth's atmosphere and outer space. She is a student at the University of North Carolina who has conducted research in radio astronomy at the Green Bank Observatory.

In another accomplishment for the New Shepard program Thursday, Ferl became the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment, or "payload," as part of a commercial suborbital space crew.

The payload from the University of Florida in Gainesville sought to understand how changes in gravity during spaceflight affect plant biology. During the flight, Ferl activated small, self-contained tubes pre-loaded with plants and preservative to biochemically freeze the samples at various stages of gravity, which will be compared to ground-based control samples,  according to NASA .

The samples will be studied to determine the effects of gravity transitions on the plants' gene expression to support future missions to the moon and Mars.

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The rise of space tourism could affect Earth's climate in unforeseen ways, scientists worry

Are the effects of rocket launches on the atmosphere really negligible?

Scientists worry that growing numbers of rocket flights and the rise of space tourism could harm Earth's atmosphere and contribute to climate change. 

When billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos soared into space this month aboard their companies' suborbital tourism vehicles, much of the world clapped in awe. 

But for some scientists, these milestones represented something other than just a technical accomplishment. Achieved after years of delays and despite significant setbacks , the flights marked the potential beginning of a long-awaited era that might see rockets fly through the so-far rather pristine upper layers of the atmosphere far more often than they do today. In the case of SpaceShipTwo, the vehicle operated by Branson's Virgin Galactic, these flights are powered by a hybrid engine that burns rubber and leaves behind a cloud of soot.

"Hybrid engines can use different types of fuels, but they always generate a lot of soot," said Filippo Maggi, associate professor of aerospace engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, who researches rocket propulsion technologies and was part of a team that several years ago published an extensive analysis of hybrid rocket engine emissions. "These engines work like a candle, and their burning process creates conditions that are favorable for soot generation."

Related: Air pollution from reentering megaconstellation satellites could cause ozone hole 2.0

According to Dallas Kasaboski, principal analyst at the space consultancy Northern Sky Research, a single Virgin Galactic suborbital space tourism flight, lasting about an hour and a half, can generate as much pollution as a 10-hour trans-Atlantic flight. Some scientists consider that disconcerting, in light of Virgin Galactic’s ambitions to fly paying tourists to the edge of space several times a day.

"Even if the suborbital tourism market is launching at a fraction of the number of launches compared to the rest of the [tourism] industry, each of their flights has a much higher contribution, and that could be a problem," Kasaboski told Space.com.

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Virgin Galactic's rockets are, of course, not the only culprits. All rocket motors burning hydrocarbon fuels generate soot, Maggi said. Solid rocket engines, such as those used in the past in the boosters of NASA's space shuttle , burn metallic compounds and emit aluminum oxide particles together with hydrochloric acid, both of which have a damaging effect on the atmosphere.

The BE-3 engine that powers Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital vehicle, on the other hand, combines liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to create thrust. The BE-3 is not a big polluter compared to other rocket engines, emitting mainly water along with some minor combustion products, experts say .

Too little is known

For Karen Rosenlof, senior scientist at the Chemical Sciences Laboratory at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the biggest problem is that rockets pollute the higher layers of the atmosphere — the stratosphere, which starts at an altitude of about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers), and the mesosphere, which goes upward from 31 miles (50 km). 

"You are emitting pollutants in places where you don't normally emit it," Rosenlof told Space.com. "We really need to understand. If we increase these things, what is the potential damage?"

So far, the impact of rocket launches on the atmosphere has been negligible, according to Martin Ross, an atmospheric scientist at the Aerospace Corporation who often works with Rosenlof. But that's simply because there have not been that many launches. 

"The amount of fuel currently burned by the space industry is less than 1% of the fuel burned by aviation," Ross told Space.com. "So there has not been a lot of research, and that makes sense. But things are changing in a way that suggests that we should learn about this in more detail."

Northern Sky Research predicts that the number of space tourism flights will skyrocket over the next decade, from maybe 10 a year in the near future to 360 a year by 2030, Kasaboski said. This estimate is still far below the growth rate that space tourism companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin envision for themselves. 

"Demand for suborbital tourism is extremely high," Kasaboski said. "These companies virtually have customers waiting in a line, and therefore they want to scale up. Ultimately, they would want to fly multiple times a day, just like short-haul aircraft do."

The rate of rocket launches delivering satellites into orbit is expected to grow as well. But Kasaboski sees bigger potential for growth in space tourism. 

"It's like the difference between a cargo flight and a passenger flight," Kasaboski said. "There's a lot more passengers that are looking to fly."

The problem is, according to Ross, that the scientific community has no idea and not enough data to tell at what point rocket launches will start having a measurable effect on the planet's climate. At the same time, the stratosphere is already changing as the number of rocket launches sneakily grows.

"The impacts of these [rocket-generated] particles are not well understood even to an order of magnitude, the factor of 10," Ross said. "The uncertainty is large, and we need to narrow that down and predict how space might be impacting the atmosphere."

Space shuttle's ozone holes 

So far, the only direct measurements of the effects of rocket launches on chemical processes in the atmosphere come from the space shuttle era. In the 1990s, as the world was coming together to salvage the damaged ozone layer , NASA, NOAA and the U.S. Air Force put together a campaign that looked at the effects of the emissions from the space shuttle's solid fuel boosters on ozone in the stratosphere. 

"In the 1990s, there were significant concerns about chlorine from solid rocket motors," Ross said. "Chlorine is the bad guy to ozone in the stratosphere, and there were some models which suggested that ozone depletion from solid rocket motors would be very significant."

The scientists used NASA's WB 57 high-altitude aircraft to fly through the plumes generated by the space shuttle rockets in Florida. Reaching altitudes of up to 60,000 feet (19 km), they were able to measure the chemical reactions in the lower stratosphere just after the rockets' passage. 

"One of the fundamental questions was how much chlorine is being made in these solid rocket motors and in what form," David Fahey, the director of the Chemical Sciences Laboratory at NOAA, who led the study, told Space.com. "We measured it several times and then analyzed the results. At that time, there were not enough space shuttle launches to make a difference globally, but locally one could deplete the ozone layer due to this diffuse plume [left behind by the rocket]."

The space shuttle retired 10 years ago, but rockets generating ozone-damaging substances continue launching humans and satellites to space today. 

In fact, in 2018, in its latest Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion , which comes out every four years, the World Meteorological Organization included rockets as a potential future concern. The organization called for more research to be done as the number of launches is expected to increase.  

Worse than geoengineering 

Rosenlof's team studies the broader effects of human-made substances in the higher layers of the atmosphere using powerful NOAA supercomputers. The work is akin to predicting the proverbial butterfly effect, the influence of minuscule changes in the chemistry of the air tens of miles above Earth on climate and weather patterns on the ground. For her, black carbon, or soot, emitted by rockets burning hydrocarbon fuels, is of particular concern.

"The problem with soot is that it absorbs ultraviolet light, and that means that it could heat the stratosphere," Rosenlof said. "When you start heating the stratosphere, the layer above the troposphere [closest to the ground], you start changing the motion in the stratosphere. You are changing the energy transfer, and that could actually affect what is happening on the ground."

Rosenlof points out that many of the particles generated by some rockets have been of interest to scientists due to the possible effects they could have on the global climate in a different context — that of geoengineering , the deliberate tampering with the atmosphere with the aim of stopping or mitigating global warming. 

Rosenlof recently co-authored a paper that used the same powerful NOAA supercomputers to model what the scientists call a climate intervention. The team was interested in the climate effects of dispersing sulfur dioxide particles, which are known to reflect light away from Earth, in combination with soot (which is also part of rocket emissions) in the lower stratosphere. Soot absorbs energy from sunlight and pushes the sulfur dioxide aerosol particles to a higher altitude by warming up the surrounding air. At that higher altitude, the sulfur dioxide can start its climate-cooling work. The experiment modeled what would happen when 1.1 million tons of sunlight-reflecting sulfur dioxide mixed with 11,000 tons of black carbon were released in the upper troposphere by aircraft over a 10-day period. 

The study didn't find any significant negative effects on weather on Earth. Yet, those results do not dispel Rosenlof's concerns about the possible risks associated with the growing number of rocket launches. 

Altering the jet stream

"Black carbon in the geoengineering experiment that we did isn't as high as the stuff from these rockets," she said. "The problem is that the higher you go, the longer something lasts. Neither of them is ideal, because either of them would produce heating in places where we don't have heating right now."

According to Maggi, the soot particles generated by hybrid rocket engines are extremely small and light-weight. In fact, when he and his colleagues tried to measure the soot output of hybrid rocket engines in a laboratory, they couldn't reliably do it with precision because of the particles' minuscule size. 

"We were able to measure the particle output from solid rocket motors," Maggi said. "These are about a micron in size, and there [are] a lot of them. But because they are large, they fall to the ground more quickly. In hybrid rocket engines, we were not able to collect the soot from the plume because it's extremely fine, a few nanometres in size."

Maggi fears these particles could, in fact, stay in the stratosphere forever.

"They have the same size as the carbon emitted by aircrafts," Maggi said. "And we know that there is a layer of carbon in the atmosphere at the flight level of aircrafts which is staying there. It's very likely that particles coming from rocket motors will do the same."

The accumulation of these particles over years and decades is what worries the scientists. Just as the current climate crisis started relatively slowly as the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere grew, the pollution in the stratosphere may only start causing harm some years down the road.

Rosenlof added that in the long term, injecting pollutants into the stratosphere could alter the polar jet stream, change winter storm patterns or affect average rainfall. 

"You might go from 25 inches [64 centimeters] a year to 20 inches [51 cm] a year in some places, which maybe doesn't sound like that big of a deal unless you are a farmer trying to grow your wheat right there," Rosenlof said. "Then a subtle change in rainfall can impact your crop yields."

Work to be done 

For this reason, Fahey says, it is critical that scientific work starts now to evaluate the future risks. 

"There is this fundamental gap where we just don't have the numbers, and that means that the science is limited because we have this lack of information," he said. "We feel it is part of our responsibility [at NOAA] to assess the impact of human activity on the stratosphere. Rockets are a principal and unique source [of stratospheric pollution], the launch frequencies are increasing and the effects are accumulating."

Fahey envisions a wider research program that would analyze the emissions and impacts of individual types of rocket engines and fuels on the stratosphere. The data could be used in Rosenlof's models to better predict the effects in accordance with the expected growth of the number of launches. Fahey, however, says that a political decision would have to come first to provide NOAA and its partners with funding that would enable them to take the high-altitude aircraft to the sky again and gather the data. The good news is, he added, that the U.S. Congress seems to be aware of the problem and things might soon start to move. 

"We would like to see a national program run by NOAA or the Air Force that would develop a database with basic emission characteristics of modern propulsion systems based on observations," he said. "We could gather some data in ground tests but also in the same way that we did with the space shuttle — by flying through the plumes just after launch."

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook . 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Tereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, aspiring fiction writer and amateur gymnast. Originally from Prague, the Czech Republic, she spent the first seven years of her career working as a reporter, script-writer and presenter for various TV programmes of the Czech Public Service Television. She later took a career break to pursue further education and added a Master's in Science from the International Space University, France, to her Bachelor's in Journalism and Master's in Cultural Anthropology from Prague's Charles University. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency.

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