The Rise of Space Tourism
Since the beginning of time, man has looked up at the stars and desired to be among them. For the first several millennia of our species’ existence, these desires could only be fulfilled in dreams, but history has shown us that mankind has the ability to turn dreams into reality.
A V2 rocket being raised into launch position in Nazi Germany
As is tragically the case with many of mankind’s greatest achievements, the first rockets were born in the throes of war. Nazi scientists pushed the technological envelope to create more sophisticated tools of death for Hitler’s war machine. When the Axis powers fell, effectively ending the war, the same talent pool of Nazi rocket scientists was raided by the new emergent super powers: the United States and the Soviet Union. The race for military superiority between these two nuclear armed nations eventually led to a race to achieve superiority in space travel.
Dubbed the “Space Race,” the United States and Soviet Union shifted massive amounts of financial resources in an attempt to one-up the other nation. Although the Soviets reached several key milestones first, history declared the United States the victor after successfully landing a man on the moon on July 20, 1969, a mere 66 years after the Wright Brothers flew on the first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft.
Space Shuttle Discovery launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida
With the race officially over, both sides began to lose interest in space exploration. Pressure mounted to diverge money and resources to things here on earth. Why keep spending money on it now that the race was over? This sentiment was further amplified once the Soviet Union fell in 1991. With its biggest geopolitical enemy now neutralized, the United Sates sat pretty on top of the world as the sole undisputed super power.
Without the need to one up the Russians, America’s space program became stagnant after Apollo 17 marked the end of man’s exploration of the moon. In an attempt to revitalize Americans’ interest in space travel, NASA developed the Space Transportation System AKA the Space Shuttle. As the the world’s first reusable space vehicle, NASA claimed they would now have the ability to launch as often as once a week at a significantly lower cost per launch, lower than any other launch vehicle in history. These claims were false.
By 2011, the cost of each shuttle launch reached about $8,000 per pound taken into Low Earth Orbit. Due to rising costs and a lower budget in order to fund two wars in the Middle East, the space shuttle was retired, leaving the United States without a way of sending astronauts into space.
So begins the era of commercial space travel. In 2004, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson dipped his toes into commercial space travel in 2004 with SpaceShipOne, a suborbital rocket-powered aircraft that promised to take passengers to the edge of space for the affordable price of $200,000 per passenger. Ultimately, SpaceShipOne was nothing more than a gimmick, and its predecessor, SpaceShipTwo, is not meant as a way of getting people into space for more than a few brief minutes.
Blue Origin’s “New Shepard” spacecraft
Things really began to pick up steam when eccentric billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk started private space companies Blue Origin and SpaceX respectively. At the beginning, Blue Origin’s goals were relatively modest, offering suborbital trips to space much like SpaceShipOne. Unlike SpaceShipOne however, Blue Origin's ship, New Shepard, would launch vertically from the ground before landing the same way. Tickets to go aboard New Shepard are still likely to cost about a quarter of a million dollars per person, still far off from making space tourism affordable to the masses. To this day, New Shepard has 11 successful test flights under its belt but has yet to operate any manned flights.
Elon Musk and SpaceX have, by far, the most ambitious plans to affordably get people into space. With the development of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, Musk makes his intentions known to the world: to create a fully reusable rocket. One of the main reasons space travel has been historically so expensive is that the rockets are lost during take off and subsequent reentry. Practically none of the parts of the Apollo spacecraft could be reused and although the Space Shuttle promised reusability, the external tank was always lost after take off and the solid rocket boosters were often too damaged to be reused as well.
SpaceX on the other hand had the wild idea of landing the first stage of the rocket and reusing it on a subsequent flight. Without the need to rebuild an entire rocket from scratch, the cost per launch drops down to $2,500 per pound and the creation of the new Falcon Heavy rocket promises to lower the cost per pound even lower, possibly into the $1,000 per pound range, lower than any rocket in history (when adjusted for inflation). SpaceX had 82 successful launches between 2010 and 2020, ferrying satellites into orbit and becoming the first private company to dock with the International Space Station. While profitable for SpaceX, being in the space cargo transportation business was not the end goal for Musk, getting people into space was.
After a lengthy certification process, NASA approved SpaceX’s Dragon 2 capsule for manned flights and on May 30, 2020 at 3:22 PM Eastern Time NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley launched into space onboard Dragon 2 sitting atop a Falcon 9 rocket on the first manned orbital flight operated by a private company.
Dennis Tito shortly after returning from his 8-day trip aboard the International Space Station
The idea of “space tourism” is not new. Ever since Yuri Gagarin first launched into space, people have dreamed about the ability for the everyday man and woman to be able to do the same. The first 40 years of manned spaceflight was reserved exclusively for astronauts, but in mid-2001, American entrepreneur Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, reportedly paying the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) $20 million for an 8 day trip in on the International Space Station.
In March 2018, Orion Span, a United States startup firm announced plans to place a luxury hotel in Low Earth Orbit. The Aurora Space Station as it’s named, would offer tourists a 12-day stay in space for $9.5 million. Additionally, guests can dine on “non-space” food and drinks for an additional fee.
Computer rendering of the commercial Axiom Space Station
Another American company, Axiom Space, has its own plans to create a privately operated space station. Unlike Orion Span, Axiom has a leg up in that it has already built modules for the International Space Station. Additionally in early 2020, NASA announced that it had given permission to Axiom to launch up to three modules to attach to the International Space Station. Once the ISS is retired in 2030, the Axiom modules would separate and eventually dock with other modules to be launched at a later date aboard SpaceX launch vehicles. Axiom states that the ticket price for an eight day stay on their station would be $55 million, with the package also including 15 weeks of training on Earth.
Space travel, in my opinion, should not be something exclusively for the super rich and $55 million isn’t exactly something the average person has laying around. So what exactly would it take to make space travel affordable for the average person? For starters the first thing that needs to be reduced is the launch cost per pound.
SpaceX’s current rate of $1,000 per pound is incredible compared to everything that came before it but it is still not even close to being good enough. At the current rate, a 180 pound man would still have to pay nearly $200,000 just on the launch cost alone. Still not exactly an amount the average person can afford. Just to bring down the launch costs to a more “reasonable” $10,000 per person, the cost per pound would have to drop to roughly $50 a pound, a 95% decrease of what it currently is on the Falcon Heavy.
Since I was a little boy growing up in a broken home and being raised by television, movies about space fascinated me with the possibility of going to space. Now as an adult, that desire is still inside me. Space is cool, but that’s not the reason I want us to go there. I want us to go there because we can. I want us to go there because I want to be proud of the human race for accepting the most daunting of challenges. Mankind has proven time and time again that we can achieve almost anything if we have the will to do so. When I’m asked why I want humanity to be a space-fairing species, I think back to President John F. Kennedy:
“Why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
