The New York Times has an interesting piece about the upcoming year in space tourism. While there is hope that the first private tourist flights will depart the Earth by the year's end, it would surprise no one if that event were delayed until next year.
It is useful to examine the current players in the nascent space tourism market.
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic is the most familiar company proposing to fly suborbital space jaunts to the well heeled and adventurous for about $200 thousand a ride. The flights would take off from the New Mexico Space Port with a huge carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, lifting a rocket ship, SpaceShipTwo, to a high altitude. From there, SpaceShipTwo would launch to a suborbital hop so that paying passengers will be able to briefly experience weightlessness and to see the curvature of the Earth. Thus far over 400 people have paid a deposit for rides on SpaceShipTwo. The spacecraft is undergoing glide tests and will go through a rigorous flight test regime prior to commercial operations, likely starting in 2013.
XCOR Aerospace
XCOR Aerospace proposes to fly a spacecraft called the Lynx, which will have a pilot and a single passenger. The Lynx would be towed down a runway to takeoff speed and would then ignite its rocket engines. It will fly in a suborbital hop, with four minutes of microgravity, and then glide back down to land on the same runway that it took off from. Plans are to start test flights in late 2012 with commercial operations in 2014. The company claims that the Lynx can fly four times per day, making up for its small passenger size.
Space Adventures
Space Adventures has sponsored a number of private space flights to the International Space Station on board the Russian Soyuz. It proposes to market sub orbital jaunts on board a space craft being developed by Armadillo Aerospace. However, the project that has garnered the most interest is a proposal to send a Soyuz around the moon with two paying passengers and a Russian cosmonaut pilot. One adventurous private space traveler, as yet unnamed, has paid $150 million for the chance to be one of the first human beings to venture beyond low Earth orbit in 40 years. One other such ticket has to be sold before this voyage can take off.
Bottom Line
The era of commercial space tourism, started by the first Space Adventures sponsored trips to the ISS, is poised to go into high gear. Other players will likely jump in once such operations start. SpaceX, for example, is contemplating a space tourism role for the crewed version of its Dragon spacecraft. Space travel will be the province of the rich, for the time being. But it will soon be no longer the exclusive province of government employees.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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