Ilida Alvarez has dreamed of traveling to space since she was a
child. But Alvarez, a legal-mediation firm owner, is afraid of flying, and she
isn’t a billionaire — two facts that she was sure, until just a few weeks ago,
would keep her fantasy as out of reach as the stars. She was wrong.
اضافة اعلان
Alvarez, 46, and her husband, Rafael Landestoy, recently booked
a flight on a 10-person pressurized capsule that — attached to a massive
helium-filled balloon — will gently float to 100,000 feet while passengers sip
champagne and recline in ergonomic chairs. The reservation required a $500
deposit; the flight itself will cost $50,000 and last six to 12 hours.
“I feel like it was tailor-made for the chickens like me who
don’t want to get on a rocket,” said Alvarez, whose flight, organized by a
company called World View, is scheduled to depart from the Grand Canyon in
2024.
Less than a year after
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson kicked off
a commercial space race by blasting into the upper atmosphere within weeks of
each other last summer, the global space tourism market is skyrocketing, with
dozens of companies now offering reservations for everything from zero-pressure
balloon trips to astronaut boot camps and simulated zero-gravity flights.
But don’t don your spacesuit just yet. While the financial
services company UBS estimates the space travel market will be worth $3 billion
by 2030, the Federal Aviation Administration has yet to approve most
out-of-this-world trips, and construction has not started on the first space
hotel. And while access and options — not to mention launchpads — are
burgeoning, space tourism remains astronomically expensive for most.
First, what counts as space travel?
Sixty miles (about 100 kilometers) above our heads lies the
Kármán line, the widely accepted aeronautical boundary of the earth’s
atmosphere. It’s the boundary used by the Féderátion Aéronautique
Internationale, which certifies and controls global astronautical records. But
many organizations in the United States, including the FAA and NASA, define
everything above 50 miles to be space.
Much of the attention has been focused on a trio of
billionaire-led rocket companies: Bezos’ Blue Origin, whose passengers have
included William Shatner of "Star Trek" fame; Branson’s Virgin
Galactic, where tickets for a suborbital spaceflight start at $450,000; and
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which in September launched an all-civilian spaceflight,
with no trained astronauts on board. Branson’s inaugural Virgin Galactic flight
in 2021 reached about 53 miles, while Blue Origin flies above the 62-mile mark.
Both are eclipsed by SpaceX, whose rockets charge far deeper in to the cosmos,
reaching more than 120 miles above Earth.
Balloons, like those operated by World View, don’t go nearly as
high. But even at their maximum altitude of 18 or 19 miles, operators say they
float high enough to show travelers the curvature of the planet, and give them
a chance to experience the overview effect — an intense perspective shift that
many astronauts say kicks in when you view Earth from above.
Now, how to get there …
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, which are both licensed for
passenger space travel by the FAA, are open for ticket sales. (Blue Origin
remains mum on pricing.) Both companies have hundreds or even thousands of
earthlings on their wait lists for a whirl to the edge of space. SpaceX charges
tens of millions of dollars for its further-reaching flights and is building a
new facility in Texas that is under FAA review.
Craig Curran is a major space enthusiast — he’s held a reserved
seat on a Virgin Galactic flight since 2011 — and the owner of Deprez Travel in
Rochester, New York. The travel agency has a special space travel arm, Galactic
Experiences by Deprez, through which Curran sells everything from rocket launch
tickets to astronaut training.
Sales in the space tourism space, Curran acknowledges, “are
reasonably difficult to make,” and mostly come from peer-to-peer networking.
“You can imagine that people who spend $450,000 to go to space probably operate
in circles that are not the same as yours and mine,” he said.
Some of Curran’s most popular offerings include flights where
you can experience the same stomach-dropping feeling of zero gravity that
astronauts feel in space, which he arranges for clients via chartered,
specialized Boeing 727s that are flown in parabolic arcs to mimic being in
space. Operators including Zero G also offer the service; the cost is around
$8,200.
You can almost count the number of completed space tourist
launches on one hand — Blue Origin has had four; SpaceX, two. Virgin Galactic,
meanwhile, on Thursday announced the launch of its commercial passenger
service, previously scheduled for late 2022, was delayed until early 2023. Many
of those on waiting lists are biding their time before blastoff by signing up
for training. Axiom Space, which contracts with SpaceX, offers NASA-partnered
training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. Virgin Galactic, which already
offers a “customized Future Astronaut Readiness program” at its Spaceport
America facility in New Mexico, is also partnering with NASA to build a
training program for private astronauts.
Not ready for a rocket? Balloon rides offer a less hair-raising
celestial experience.
“We go to space at 12 miles an hour, which means that it’s very
smooth and very gentle. You’re not rocketing away from Earth,” said Jane
Poynter, a co-founder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, which is readying its
own touristic balloon spaceship, Spaceship Neptune. If all goes according to
plan, voyages are scheduled to begin departing from Florida in 2024, at a cost
of $125,000 per person. That’s a fraction of the price tag for Blue Origin and
Virgin Galactic, but still more than double the average annual salary of an
American worker.
Neither Space Perspective nor World View has the required
approval yet from the FAA to operate flights.
Unique implications
Whether a capsule or a rocket is your transport, the travel
insurance company battleface launched a civilian space insurance plan in late
2021, a direct response, said CEO Sasha Gainullin, to an increase in space
tourism interest and infrastructure. Benefits include accidental death and
permanent disablement in space and are valid for spaceflights on operators like
SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, as well as on stratospheric balloon
rides. They’ve had many inquiries, Gainullin said, but no purchases just yet.
“Right now it’s such high-net-worth individuals who are
traveling to space, so they probably don’t need insurance,” he said. “But for
quote-unquote regular travelers, I think we’ll see some takeups soon.”
Stay a while?
In the future, space enthusiasts insist, travelers won’t be
traveling to space just for the ride. They’ll want to stay a while. Orbital
Assembly Corp., a manufacturing company whose goal is to colonize space, is
building the world’s first space hotels — two ring-shaped properties that will
orbit Earth, called Pioneer Station and Voyager Station. The company, quite
optimistically, projects an opening date of 2025 for Pioneer Station, with a
capacity of 28 guests. The design for the larger Voyager Station, which they
say will open in 2027, promises villas and suites, as well as a gym, restaurant
and bar. Both provide the ultimate luxury: simulated gravity. Axiom Space, a
space infrastructure company, is building the world’s first private space
station; plans include Philippe Starck-designed accommodations for travelers to
spend the night.
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