Space Tourism Personal Spaceflight for you ...

Experience microgravity on a commercial parabolic flight.

In April of 2001, Dennis Tito became the first traveler to pay for a trip to space with money out of his own pocket. He decided to do it and then just did it. That's what tourism is all about. His flight, and the subsequent one by Mark Shuttleworth, forever removed the giggle factor from discussions of space tourism.

In October of 2004, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne won the X PRIZE and thereby started a new race to develop the first vehicle that will provide suborbital space rides to paying customers. Suborbital generally refers to an up-and-down ( i.e. mostly vertical) flight that reaches an altitude of around 100km or more but does not go into orbit around the earth.

Market Studies by NASA and many other organizations have shown that there are sizable markets for space tourism, both suborbital and orbital, and that the markets will grow rapidly as the cost of sending a person into space drops from current levels.

Adventure tourism, such as trips to Antarctica or Mount Everest, has long been a profitable business. This can involve packages with prices as high as $100k range and even higher.
Though you commonly hear talk of "space joyrides for the rich", the development of space tourism will follow the normal course of development seen for most all consumer technologies and services.

Tourism itself began as something only done by the very rich.

Passenger flights on airlines were initially very expensive. VCRs, DVDs, PCs, etc. all started out as very expensive "toys". Eventually competition and economies of scale (i.e. mass production) take over and prices drop to the level the middle class can handle.

Before orbital rides are widely available, suborbital flights will be the most common way to ride into space. Going to 100km or so, one can see the horizon out to 1000km or so and clearly see the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space.

The billionaire Richard Branson in September 2004 announced a contract with Burt Rutan that gave him funding to design and build a 5-8 passenger vehicle - unofficially referred to here as SpaceShipTwo. SS2 will safely and routinely fly above 100km for a cost of about $200k per seat.

Within a month of this announcement, Virgin Galactic already had 7000 people expressing strong interest in buying tickets to ride on the vehicle when it becomes available. The current goal is to begin flights in 2007.

The company Space Adventures also has had over 100 people place deposits, or pay the full $98k price, on a suborbital craft as soon as one become available. In the meantime, this company and others offer rides on MIG-25's that go to 25km in altitude.

You can also train for spaceflight by experiencing microgravity in Russian plane flying parabolic trajectories. The company ZERO-G in October 2004 began offering such rides in the US for $3000 per person. The first 20 flights were already sold out before they began regular service.

If you can't pay for an orbital trip, perhaps you can win a ride. There are now several contests in which the winner will go into space.

There have been announcements of several "Survivor" type reality format TV programs in which a group of contestants will struggle through several weeks of cosmonaut training and the winner going to the International Space Station. However, so far none of these programs have reached the production stage.

A commercial space habitat prototype built
by Bigelow Aerospace.

For the time when orbital flights become lower in price, there are companies designing space hotels where you can enjoy microgravity sports and great views of earth. The company Bigelow Aerospace will begin launching prototypes in 2005 of its inflatable space habitat and will launch a full scaled version that can be manned by 2010.

See this slide presentation by Sam Coniglio at the Space Tourism Society for a nice overview of the possibilities for future space tourism.

If you would like to travel in space in spirit only, then send a token of yourself, e.g. your name or DNA sample, on a space probe.

See also the section on Astronomy Tourism that involves trips to see eclipses, Aurora and other astronomical phenomena.