Space tourism -Past To future

Space tourism is human space travel for recreational purposes. There are several
different types of space tourism, including orbital, suborbital and
lunar space tourism. To date, orbital space
tourism has been performed only by the
Russian Space Agency.

The first astronaut left Earth 20 years ago on top

of a Russian rocket.
Now, private companies are offering travel for
those who can afford it.

History of space tourism:

To most people, going to the stars is nothing more than a dream.
NASA has long been hesitant to play host to space tourists, so Russia – looking for sources of
money post-Cold War in the 1990s and 2000s – has been the only option available for those
looking for this kind of extreme adventure and this extreme adventure lover man is Dennis.
On April 26, 2001, Dennis Tito achieved his lifelong goal - Tito, a wealthy businessman, became
the first tourist on an international trip to pay US$20 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz
spacecraft.

Fig: Dennis Tito, on the left beside two Russian astronauts, was the first private citizen to ever
go to space – and he spent more than a week on the International Space Station.

Only seven people have followed suit in the 20 years since.

Expansion of space tourism:
Space Aircraft are expensive. A rocket must burn a lot of costly fuel to travel high and fast
enough to enter Earth’s orbit .But there are an Another cheaper possibility is a suborbital
launch, with the rocket going high enough to reach the edge of space and coming right back
down.
The difficulty and expense of both options mean that, traditionally, only countries-states have
been able to explore space. This began to change in the 1990s as one entrepreneur after
another entered the space arena. Led by the CEO of Billionaire, three companies have emerged
as big players: Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX. Although no payments have been made
by private Customers

following in the footsteps of space tourism, British billionaire Richard Branson created the
brand for his adventurous love. He founded Virgin Galactic after buying Spaceship On, an
organization that won the Ansari X-Award for its first reusable location. Since then Virgin
Galactic has tried to design, build and operate a larger spaceship that can carry six passengers
on a suburban flight. With the capsules on previous test flights reaching an altitude of more
than 340,000 feet (or more than 100 km). The capsule, which has massive windows to give
passengers a view, spends as much as 10 minutes in zero gravity before returning to Earth.
There are two companies competing in the realm of suborbital tourism: Virgin Galactic, which
debuted on the public market last year and trades under the ticker “SPCE,” and Blue Origin, the
private space company funded almost entirely by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Fig: The VSS Unity spacecraft is one of the ships that Virgin Galactic plans to use for space tours.

The journey has been tougher than expected. Virgin Galactic faced several major hurdles when
Branson predicted the business would open to tourists in 2009- a pilot was killed in a crash
in 2014. It’s one. Engineers found significant problems with the design of the vehicle after the
accident, for solving the problem, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, respective leaders of SpaceX and
Blue Origin, began their own ventures in the early 2000s. Elon Musk who is famous for
commercializing the first mass-market electric car Tesla

It Was disappointed by the lack of progress in building as a perennial species. He founded

SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of developing reusable launch technology to reduce the cost of
space travel. Since then, SpaceX has had success with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.
The ultimate goal of SpaceX is the human settlement of Mars - an intermediate step in sending
the customer into space.
Bezos was inspired by the vision of physicist Gerard O’Neill and wants to expand humanity and
industry not to Mars, but to space itself. Blue Origin, established in 2004, has proceeded slowly
and quietly in also developing reusable
rockets. Its New Shepard rocket, first
successfully flown in 2015, will
eventually offer tourists a suborbital trip
to the edge of space, similar to Virgin
Galactic’s. For Bezos, these launches
represent an effort at making space
travel routine, reliable and accessible to
people as a first step to enabling further
space exploration.

Fig: SpaceX has already started selling tickets to the public and has future plans to use
its Starship rocket, a prototype of which is seen here, to send people to Mars.

The Tourist Experience:

There are two important theories of the tourist experience. In 1976, McConnell
developed The first theory that tourism itself consists of the search for ‘authenticity.’
This starts from Marx's observation that living in the modern world produces a state of
alienation in which we cannot realize our real selves. The reason why people travel is,
therefore, to escape from the real world in order to experience a different world, and to
discover the ‘authentic.’ And other developed By Boorstin in 1962,

Future Perspective:
Now, for anyone looking to go into space and
into Earth orbit, the only solution is SpaceX.
That is why there are currently plans for two
tourist launches. The first is scheduled for
early September 2021, funded by billionaire
businessman Jared Isaac man. Another trip
planned for 2022 by Axiom Space is being
arranged. Travel and accommodation on
airplanes and the International Space Station
will cost US$55 million. The high cost has led
some to warn that space tourism – and
private access to space more broadly – might
reinforce inequality between rich and poor.Blue Origin costs $ 200,000 and Virgin Galactic costs
$ 250,000 for suburban travel. Besides Blue Orgin saying after a recent launch that
crewed missions would be happening “soon.” Virgin Galactic continues to test
SpaceShipTwo. Although these prices are high, the pleasure of seeing the earth from
space is different.
In any case tourist trips into space have become common today, though not widely
spread. State companies and private corporations understand that a breakthrough,
allowing cutting the flight cost and thus making it widely available, will automatically
bring them to a new market that will not only pay for itself, but knock up a fortune for its
pioneers. Meanwhile, Japanese aerospace research agency JAXA has set a goal to
create an orbital tourist hotel and scientific zone approximately until 2050
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will soon begin selling tickets for rides on its space tourism
rocket.

From my perspective, I see the

beginning of an era in which more
people can experience space. With
companies like SpaceX and Blue
Origin hoping to build a future for
humanity in space, space tourism is a
way to demonstrate both the safety and
reliability of space travel to the general
public.

Written By: SM Mehady Hasan

Aeronautical engineering Dept., MIST
Executive Director- Technical, MAAC
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sm-mehady-hasan-5b46b11a7

Reference:
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