Space tourism is defined both as the
act of
traveling for
pleasure in space and the
business of providing
services for tourists in space. While I would presume just about all
voluntary
astronauts ever have found at least some aspect of
space travel "pleasurable", for the purposes of this writeup,
I will exclude any trips made primarily for
military,
scientific or
commercial purposes -- and yes, this includes
John Glenn.
The Theory
NASA has studied the idea of space tourism quite extensively,
and the summary of their investigations can be found in a lengthy
report entitled General Public Space Travel and Tourism (1997),
available (for time being) at:
http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/general_public_space_travel_and_tourism.shtml
The big conclusions are more or less obvious:
- There is a definite consumer demand
- Current means of transportation are way too expensive and unreliable
- The idea of space tourism suffers from a
"persistent lack of credibility"
The report was written five years ago and the few predictions it
offered -- "travel and tourism business interests are offering initial space trip services that could begin in the next few years" -- have
for most part come true. Still, the numbers required for wide-scale,
profitable space tourism remain depressingly far off:
- An orbital trip should be achievable for $1-2 million, about 100 times
less than a Space Shuttle flight
- An overall safety of 0.9999+ is required, about 100 times safer
than the Shuttle
- Even after reaching these a trip will cost about $50000 per passanger
A more optimistic assessment, albeit a rather scathing one towards
the inaction of government space agencies, can be found at
http://www.spacefuture.org/tourism/.
The Past
By the initial definition, there have been only
two space tourists
so far. The first was Dennis Tito, the millionaire founder of Wilshire Associates
and a lifelone space enthusiast, who paid some $20 million for a
jaunt on a Soyuz up to the
International Space Station on April 30th, 2001. Tito was
originally supposed to fly to the Russian Mir space station,
but after Mir was taken down, his flight was moved to the ISS despite
fierce NASA objections. The second, Mark Shuttleworth,
a young multimillionare who was the former owner of Thawte Consulting, followed suit on April 25th, 2002 with
an 8-day trip to the ISS, this time without too much
grumbling from NASA.
The Present
Tito's route remains the only option if you want to get into
space as a pure tourist, and with two tourists now
having proven that it is possible there has been much
media speculation about the next visitors --
one oft-mentioned name is Lance Bass from the boy
band N'Sync. Image World Media is also planning
to fly two game show winners to the ISS sometime
in 2003.
And, unfortunately, that is pretty much it at the moment,
although there are a few ways to pretend you are in space.
Some jet fighters, like the MiG-25 Foxbat, can fly at an altitude
of over 25,000 meters, high enough to see the curvature of the
earth. (Estimated price tag: $12,000 per flight.) Another option is
simulated zero-gravity flights, where a jet flies in an steep reverse
arc providing a whopping 30 seconds of microgravity; one flight with
8-12 of these hops will set you back about $5000.
Pretty much the only serious space travel agency at the moment
is Space Adventures, which has handled both Tito's and Shuttleworth's
flights and also offers all the activities listed above.
The Future
Science fiction writers have spent the last 100 years conjuring up
visions of space travel for the masses, but I'll limit this to
projects with a snowball's chance in hell. In decreasing order
of probability:
There are now so many competitors for the X Prize
that one of them may actually manage the trick some day not too far
off in the future, namely,
reaching a suborbital altitude of 100 km twice in 14 days with
the same ship. (See commercial space flight for some of the
contenders.) Space Adventures plans to offers suborbital flights
starting in 2003-2005 for $98000 a pop and is already taking reservations;
some of the contractors are claiming prices as low as $50000.
SPACEHAB, an American contractor for the ISS that
was responsible for the Spacehab module currently in use
as crew quarters, is busily designing the Enterprise,
which is not just a clever in-joke but
the world's first commercial inhabited space structure.
If all goes according to plan, the Enterprise will be
added to the ISS in 2005. While the primary use
will probably be for long-term experiments, reading
between the lines, it appears that use of the structure for
other purposes might be possible as well; after all,
there is exactly one use for space
multimedia that is guaranteed to draw an audience.
However, quite possibly the most exciting development in space tourism
these days comes from MirCorp, the original mastermind behind
Tito's flight, which has signed an apparently
entirely serious deal with Rosaviacosmos, the Russian space agency,
and RSC Energia, the main contractor for the Mir and much of the ISS,
to build a small commercial space station that would accommodate
three people for up to 20 days, tentatively entitled Mini Station 1
and scheduled for commercial operations in 2004.
NASA's report didn't even bother considering options for tourism
beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO), but moving down into the
"don't hold your breath"
category, the Artemis Project is working on detailed plans for
colonizing the Moon.
Actual achievements so far seem to be limited to a few rather dinky
VRML models of the planned moonbase though, and funding seems
equally dubious.
Oddly enough, the technically far more challenging task of going
to Mars seems to have a more serious group, the Mars Society,
behind it. Mars Society has gotten its act together well enough
to be presently conducting two simultaneous experiments on
simulating life on Mars, one for arctic conditions on Devon Island
in Nunavut, northern Canada, and the other for desert conditions
in southern Utah, USA. Still, the Mars Society's goals are
also distinctly more modest (or should that be realistic?),
mainly conducting Mars-related research and pressuring NASA and
other national space agencies into doing a manned flight.
And finally, barring immense scientific breakthroughs, interstellar
flight and terraforming other planets just isn't going to
happen in our lifetime, although there are plenty of websites out
there that would love to tell you otherwise...
References
Space Adventures, http://www.spaceadventures.com
MirCorp, http://www.mir-corp.com
SPACEHAB, http://www.spacehab.com
Artemis Project, http://www.asi.org
Mars Society, http://www.marssociety.org