Space Tourism

Would you like to travel into space? Why/why not?

In a few years, we could be using spaceships as we use passenger airplanes, according to independent space agency analysts. Commercial operators are now competing to operate scheduled services to the outer limits of the Earth's atmosphere. Hundreds of wealthy entrepreneurs, celebrities and scientists have already booked tickets for the first flights by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism business, which will probably take off in the next two years. Its new runway in New Mexico (USA) opened at the weekend.

Professor Richard Crowther, Technical Adviser to the UK Space Agency, predicted that in the future space trips would become a lot more regular and a lot cheaper. "It will be very expensive at first, but the technology that will then develop will open up space to everybody," he said.

"In the early days of aviation, very few people went on aircraft, but now it's mass market. A mass market for taking people into space will be a long way away, but the costs should fall with new technology."

Fewer than 500 people have flown into space on spaceships operated by Russia, the US and China. With the Cold War over, the US and Russia have lost the incentive to invest billions into space programmes.

Instead, commercial enterprises have become interested. One of them is Virgin Galactic, founded by the British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson in 2004. Another is Blue Origin, started by Amazon creator Jeff Bezos.

Another company, Space Adentures arranged for seven multi-millionaires to live on the Russian Soyuz space station for up to 15 days, paying $20m each.

According to Virgin Galactic, 380 people have booked tickets on its VSS Enterprise at $200,000 each. They include several well-known scientists, celebrities and businessmen. Virgin said space tourism had allowed scientific advances to take place without state funding.

Will Whitehorn, Virgin Galactic's president, said there was a very low environmental impact. "We will, in a 10 year programme, fly tens of thousands of people into space with less impact than one NASA Space Shuttle."

The flights will also be much cheaper: around ¿1m per flight, compared with ¿1bn for a US space shuttle flight. The reason is that the Virgin Galactic spaceships are much lighter than NASA spaceships and can be re-used.

Mr Whitehorn denied reports that the price would fall to $20,000. "I don't think it will ever get that low," he said, but he added that it would become much cheaper than $200,000.