SPACE TOURISM
You can now buy tickets into space, even taking a space walk around the International Space Station. And the Moon will soon be on the itinerary. While space tourism was once seen as “inappropriate”, the new wave of private space companies view it as an essential way to cover development costs.
Space is now finally within reach of ordinary (if wealthy) people. If you have the money and can face 15 weeks of astronaut training, you could spend your next summer holiday in a state of weightlessness inside and outside the International Space Station.
The countdown has begun. Three tourists and their tour guide fasten their seat belts. They are going neither north nor south, but instead up – into space, heading for the International Space Station, ISS, which is orbiting Earth some 420km above the planet’s surface.
The four passengers are seated in the Crew Dragon spacecraft on top of a 62metre-high Falcon 9 space rocket. The rocket accelerates violently, forcing the passengers back against their seats. After one minute they are travelling faster than the speed of sound, and have reached an altitude of 9km above the Florida spaceport. After two minutes and 33 seconds, the speed is 6800km/h — and the rocket engines are switched off. For a brief moment, everything is quiet. The first rocket stage disconnects, falling back towards the Earth below.
A few seconds later, the brief peace is shattered by the ignition of the second rocket stage, and once again the passengers are forced back against their seats. Almost three minutes after launch they have reached an altitude of 100km. They are now officially in space and can call themselves astronauts. Earth’s surface is getting ever more distant as the upward flight continues, and the speed increases to more than 27,000+ km/h. Only nine minutes after the rocket was launched, the Crew Dragon has entered into orbit around the Earth. Over the next few hours, the spacecraft will quietly approach the International Space Station.
The space tourists paid US$55m each for their tickets to the space station, something which could become reality as early as the end of 2021. The money was paid to the Axiom Space company, which books the trip with the American company SpaceX, and the stay at the space station with NASA. And travel agencies don’t plan to stop there – the next steps could be the creation of space hotels orbiting Earth, and week-long tourist trips around the Moon.
Russia offers space walks
Space tourism will gain momentum in the years to come. After decades of approaches, American aerospace companies are now very close to sending paying guests into space. They will almost certainly offer trips from mere hours in space to longer stays.
But the prize for ‘first tourist in space’ has already been taken, by US engineer and entrepreneur Dennis Tito. He was the first of seven private individuals – six men and one woman – who bought a trip to the International Space Station between 2001 and 2009. Those trips were organised by American space travel agency Space Adventures, and were delivered through cooperation with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, at a time when NASA considered it “inappropriate” for a tourist to take a ride into space. Yet in this way, Russia was able to earn some of the cost of its national space programme. And now, history is repeating itself.
Roscosmos has just made a new arrangement with Space Adventures, allowing the sale of two more Sojuz tickets to the ISS. One of the space tourists, to be launched in 2023, will even be allowed to take a space walk – the ultimate sightseeing experience. Wearing a Russian space suit, the tourist will exit the space station and ‘walk’ for up to 1.5 hours. A space suit for space walks is like a small spacecraft in itself. The suit protects against the lethal vacuum of outer space, while a backpack brings the space walker oxygen, a climate system for ventilation and temperature control, plus filters that remove carbon dioxide from expired air.
A space walk offers a splendid view, but it is also hard work.
Space walks
are physically demanding, as the space suit is inflexible and difficult to move about in. The pressure inside the suit is only 40% of normal atmospheric pressure, and the astronaut breathes pure oxygen during the space walk. It may become essential to remain calm and to remember a long series of safety procedures even if the situation becomes stressful. So future space tourists must first spend several weeks exercising on the space walk in Star City, the Russian astronaut centre to the north-east of Moscow.
Billionaires change space travel
In the longer term, it is expected that most space tourists will be launched from the US, where manned aerospace missions are being revolutionised by commercial aerospace activities. It is so expensive to develop, build, and launch rockets that historically, such efforts have always been undertaken by governments. But a new generation of spacejunkie billionaires has seen ‘astronomical’ amounts of private money invested in
space. The most successful private company is SpaceX, run by the world’s wealthiest (as we write) man, Elon Musk. On 30 May 2020, SpaceX became the first private company to launch people into an orbit around Earth and to the International Space Station. The US company’s client was NASA, the people aboard the Crew Dragon two experienced astronauts: Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.
SpaceX now has NASA’s approval that the Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon meet all requirements for manned aerospace missions – a stamp of quality that paves the way for tourist flights.
Like Axiom Space, Space Adventures also plans to book the Crew Dragon for paying guests, but a stay at the ISS is not included. Instead, three or four space tourists will remain in the spacecraft as it orbits Earth. The trip can bring the tourists two to three three times deeper into space than the altitude of the space station. Nobody has been that far away from Earth since the Apollo missions to the Moon 50 years ago.
The Crew Dragon is fully automatic and can orbit Earth for up to five days. The space capsule’s volume is around that of a large van, sufficient to allow passengers to float around in a state of weightlessness, though rather cramped if the mission were to last for several days. Nevertheless Space Adventures expects to be ready for launch in late 2021, at a price of around A$42 million.
Weightlessness feels like falling
SpaceX will have competition from a wellestablished aircraft maker and aerospace company, Boeing, which has developed a spacecraft known as Starliner. Just like SpaceX, Boeing has been hired by NASA, which prefers to send astronauts to the ISS with an American rocket from American soil instead of paying the Russians to launch them. Since the last space shuttle was pensioned off in 2011, NASA has been unable to carry astronauts to the ISS itself, but now SpaceX and soon also Boeing will be able to help the agency.
Boeing is lagging about one year behind SpaceX, and has not yet launched humans into space. But its plans for the future also include space tourism with the Starliner, to be launched with an Atlas V rocket from the United Launch Alliance, and able to carry up to seven space travellers.
The highlights of such a mission will undoubtedly be the experience of weightlessness, and the view of Earth from
space. Both of these are perhaps best experienced from the ISS, which offers plenty of space and even a special observation module with seven large windows, from which there is a spectacular view of Earth. The ISS orbits Earth 16 times a day, and the landscape below the space station is constantly changing. The tourists could take photos of the Amazon river winding through South America, of the characteristic boot shape of Italy in the Mediterranean, or of the Bahamas surrounded by the clear, turquoise water of the Caribbean. Even bad weather can look spectacular from space.
When the tourists are not enjoying the view, they can float through the space station in a state of weightlessness. But that is a challenge in itself. It can be difficult for the body to get used to weightlessness, which is due to the fact that the ISS is in an eternal free-fall around Earth. Many will feel that they are constantly descending, and some astronauts suffer from space sickness, which they say feels a little like car sickness.
Space hotel is an optional extra
The ISS is not a cheap hotel, despite its spartan facilities. NASA charges US$35,000 per night, and tourists aren’t even guaranteed a private room. The space station has only six small sleeping cubicles, and if these are all occupied, new arrivals will have to sleep somewhere else that their sleeping bags can be reliably attached.
In 2025, Axiom Space will provide the ISS with an extra residential module, with eight more cubicles. Once the space station has been expanded by this space hotel, which includes a large observatory module, space tourism should be able to gain momentum, and prices will fall as aerospace companies gear up and competition increases. But in the foreseeable future, a trip including an orbit around Earth will still cost millions of US dollars. Even with more reusable rockets and spacecraft, it will remain very expensive to launch people to the space station.
Short trips at a discount price
People who are less than mega-wealthy also stand a chance if they are happy with a few minutes in space, rather than a full tour. You can already book a ‘discount’ trip with either
Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin at a price of some US$250,000. They hope to launch their first tourists into space in 2021 or 2022.
Blue Origin’s tourists will travel to an altitude of slightly more than 100km, only to fall back down again, experiencing 3-5 minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Up to six people can get a seat in the space capsule at the top of his 18-metre fully reusable New Shepard space rocket. From the spaceport in Texas, the rocket will accelerate upwards for 2.5 minutes before its engine is switched off. Then the space capsule is detached from the rest of the rocket, and the passengers fly in a state of weightlessness in the 15m3 cabin. The space capsule will land back on Earth only 11 minutes after departure.
Virgin Galactic claims it has around 600 bookings already, including Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio. Their trip aboard the SpaceShipTwo spaceplane will take a little longer, carried first to an altitude of 15km by the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, then detached so the spaceplane’s rocket can be activated, launching it almost vertically upwards into space, where tourists will experience weightlessness for about five minutes before SpaceShipTwo falls back into the atmosphere and glides to the landing strip.
Once Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have launched sufficient tourists to cover their investment, prices will be further reduced. Perhaps one day it will not only be wealthy millionaires who travel into space .
The Moon as tourist resort
For some tourists, a short trip into space or a longer stay at the space station is not enough. They would like to travel further – to se Earth reduced to a small, distant, blue world. SpaceX is constructing a huge rocket that would allow orbits around the Moon. Prototypes of the 50-metre-tall Starship craft are tested in Texas, and the Super Heavy Rocket booster is in its early development stage. Yusaku Maezawa of Japan has volunteered to be the first space tourist to fly 400,000km into space, passing by the Moon. Maezawa will be accompanied by a group of artists in the #dearMoon project.
According to (perhaps optimistic) time schedules, the Moon mission will take place in 2023. But as the rocket and the spacecraft have not yet been constructed or tested, the maiden voyage is very likely to be delayed by a few years. But Starship might not send only tourists on round trips to the Moon. NASA is considering using it as the landing craft for the Artemis programme, which is to take astronauts back to the Moon in 2024, to begin building a permanent base.