Space tourism

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dennis Tito - the first space tourist who paid for his space flight with his own funds in 2001

As space tourism for pleasure or study tours are in the space designated.

So far, space tourists have visited the International Space Station (ISS) for one to two weeks , completed suborbital flights and multi-day orbital flights . A circumnavigation of the moon is planned.

story

In 1964, the then US airline Pan American complied with the request of the Austrian journalist Gerhart Pistor to book a ticket to the moon and drafted a plan to start tourist space flights by the year 2000. They even opened a waiting list for potential passengers who were up to 1989 grew to 93,000 interested parties. Also in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, such space flights are shown in great detail. But in 1991 PanAm was liquidated and their plans were wasted.

In 1997, the tourism company Thomas Cook took up the idea of ​​a free waiting list for package tours to the moon with the "Moon Register" project. Lift the idea also received by July 25, 1998 by the NASA -created study General Public Space Travel and Tourism .

Anousheh Ansari - the first female space tourist

In general, Dennis Tito's trip to the ISS from April 28th to May 6th 2001 is considered to be the hour of birth of space tourism. The second space tourist was Ubuntu inventor Mark Shuttleworth , who was the first South African to launch into space on April 25, 2002 and visit the ISS. Both paid about $ 20 million for their flight on the Russian Soyuz spaceship . On October 1, 2005, the American Gregory Olsen , entrepreneur of Sensor Unlimited Inc., took off to the ISS in a Soyuz spaceship. At first, after medical tests, he was not approved for the flight, but was later approved. Iranian- born Anousheh Ansari was the first space tourist to take a Soyuz spaceship to the ISS on September 18, 2006. In 2006 she paid around 16 million euros for her space flight. The cinema documentary Space Tourists shows their flight preparations. Charles Simonyi is the only space tourist to have flown twice ($ 25 million and $ 35 million, respectively). The Russian entrepreneur Sergei Jurjewitsch Polonski from Saint Petersburg was also planning a flight to the ISS.

There was a stimulation for private space flights through the 1996 announcement of the Ansari X-Prize . This rewarded the first manned space flight realized by a private operator with ten million US dollars. On June 21, 2004 , the first manned suborbital flight took place with the spacecraft SpaceShipOne , which had been planned and built solely from private funds . The declared goal of the developers is to make space accessible to tourists at a reasonably affordable price.

Training units for budding space tourists, for example test flights with spaceship simulators or parabolic flights , are offered commercially in the Yuri Gagarin cosmonaut training center in Star City near Moscow and by various providers in the USA .

In March 2004, the US House of Representatives decided that in the future private companies should get approvals for tests with spaceships for commercial flights into space more quickly . The state air traffic control authority (FAA) should monitor space tourism in the future and define requirements for the qualification of space crews. The law had yet to be passed in the US Senate.

providers

Initially, the unrestricted market leader for space tourism was Space Adventures . This company acted as a service provider for all seven space tourists who flew until the end of the 2000s. The flights were carried out by the Russian state space agency Roskosmos on board Soyuz spacecraft . For the Soyuz MS-20 mission from December 2021 to January 2022, Spaceflight Adventures has agreed with Roskosmos to transport two more tourists to the ISS. The company is also planning a low-earth orbit flight for up to four people on SpaceX's Crew Dragon .

Axiom Space also wants to bring tourists to the ISS from 2022 with the chartered Crew Dragon . The company is also planning to add its own space station to the ISS. Axiom works with NASA on these projects.

The company Virgin Galactic of the British entrepreneur Richard Branson was founded specifically for the purpose of space tourism. According to its own information, the company has already had 7,000 interested parties for a suborbital flight at a price of around 200,000 US dollars and more than 500 bookings. In 2006, Branson announced that it would offer and operate scheduled flights into space from 2008, which is still planned for a later date. For the time being, only short flights with the spacecraft SpaceShipTwo to the limit of space are to take place.

The US space company Blue Origin also wants to offer suborbital flights. It developed the reusable New Shepard rocket for this purpose , which brings a space capsule to an altitude of over 100 kilometers for a short time. The system has been in the test since 2015 and should be available to tourists from 2021.

The Crew Dragon manufacturer SpaceX also offers the spaceship directly for tourist flights; The first of these multi-day short trips will take place in September 2021 with the Inspiration4 mission . SpaceX is also planning a manned flight to the moon with the Starship spaceship , which is still in development, under the project name Dear Moon . The planned start date is 2023. In September 2018, SpaceX presented the Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa as a sponsor of this mission. Maezawa will not only take part in the flight to the moon, but will also invite several artists from different backgrounds. The works that they then create are intended to “awaken the dreamer in all of us”.

Abandoned projects

The EADS subsidiary Astrium Space Transportation designed a business jet-like spaceship that would take a pilot and four passengers at 100 km altitude since of 2006. The flight itself should take about two hours, with several minutes of weightlessness. Astrium reckoned that the first commercial flights would have been possible around seven years after the funding was secured. Critics accused EADS of having copied the Rocketplane concept from competitor Rocketplane Limited, Inc. He built a very similar spaceship based on a Learjet until the end of 2007 , but had to give it up due to economic difficulties. Austrian Penny-Markt -Filalen offered orbital package tours in advance in 2010. The flights were to be carried out by Rocketplane, but this could not stop the bankruptcy of the company, which occurred in the same year.

The company Bigelow Aerospace worked on the development of a space hotel . A first test satellite called Genesis 1 was launched on July 12, 2006; In addition, the BEAM module has been tested at the ISS since April 2016. Tourist flights to the ISS were also planned for $ 52 million per person; Bigelow wanted to charter the spaceship Crew Dragon from SpaceX . However, due to the large number of organizations involved in the ISS, the implementation had proven to be too complicated. A little later, Bigelow ceased operations; NASA's new partner for tourist visits to the ISS has meanwhile been Axiom Space .

Before 2020, the Russian company RKK Energija, in cooperation with Space Adventures, wanted to offer flights around the Earth's moon with a modified Soyuz spaceship for 150 million US dollars. The project was called DSE-Alpha . The crew should consist of a professional Russian cosmonaut and two tourists; According to RKK Energija, the flight of a single tourist would not be profitable. In 2014, contracts were signed with two potential tourists.

List of orbital space tourists

Surname country Start date target Outbound flight with Return flight with Flight duration
Dennis Tito United StatesUnited States Apr 28, 2001 ISS Soyuz TM-32 Soyuz TM-31 7d 22h 4min
Mark Shuttleworth South AfricaSouth Africa United KingdomUnited Kingdom Apr 25, 2002 ISS Soyuz TM-34 Soyuz TM-33 9d 21h 25min
Gregory Olsen United StatesUnited States Oct 1, 2005 ISS Soyuz TMA-7 Soyuz TMA-6 9d 21h 7min
Anousheh Ansari United StatesUnited States IranIran Sep 18 2006 ISS Soyuz TMA-9 Soyuz TMA-8 10d 21h 4min
Charles Simonyi United StatesUnited States HungaryHungary Apr 7, 2007 ISS Soyuz TMA-10 Soyuz TMA-9 13d 19h 0min
March 26, 2009 ISS Soyuz TMA-14 Soyuz TMA-13 12d 19h 27min
Richard Garriott United StatesUnited States United KingdomUnited Kingdom Oct 12, 2008 ISS Soyuz TMA-13 Soyuz TMA-12 11d 20h 36min
Guy Laliberté CanadaCanada Sep 30 2009 ISS Soyuz TMA-16 Soyuz TMA-14 10d 21h 18min
Jared Isaacman United StatesUnited States 16 Sep 2021 LEO Inspiration4 approx. 3d (planned)
Hayley Arceneaux United StatesUnited States
Sian Proctor United StatesUnited States
Chris Sembroski United StatesUnited States

List of planned tourist orbital flights

mission Start at the earliest target Passengers Duration approx. operator Client
Soyuz MS-20 Dec. 2021 ISS 2 12 days Roscosmos Space Adventures
Ax-1 Jan. 2022 ISS 3 10 days SpaceX Axiom Space
Soyuz MS-23 Oct. 2022 ISS 2 6 months Roscosmos
2022 LEO 4th ≤ 5 days SpaceX Space Adventures

Web links

Commons : Space Tourism  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mufson, Steven: Pan Am Still Plans Moon Flight, And 93,000 Are on Waiting List. Washington Post article dated July 21, 1989.
  2. ↑ PressReader.com - Newspapers from around the world. In: PressReader . Retrieved August 3, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Sam Blum: When Pan Am Promised to Fly Us to the Moon. In: Popular Mechanics . February 28, 2019, accessed August 3, 2019 .
  4. ^ Marc Bielefeld: The business with the moon . In: The daily newspaper: taz . December 27, 1997, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 15 ( taz.de [accessed on January 13, 2021]).
  5. ↑ Anousheh Ansari becomes the first Iranian woman in space. In: Planet Persia: "The extraterrestrial pleasure costs you about 20 million dollars (15.7 million euros)."
  6. ↑ a b Roskosmos brings two space tourists to the ISS . Golem.de, February 21, 2019.
  7. ↑ Космические туристы смогут встретить Новый год на орбите . RIA Novosti, April 20, 2020.
  8. ^ Space Adventures Announces Agreement with SpaceX to Launch Private Citizens on the Crew Dragon Spacecraft . Press release from Space Adventures, February 18, 2020.
  9. ↑ Twitter message from Axiom Space, January 31, 2020.
  10. ↑ Space travel will take off in five years, travel boss says, August 9, 2006 .
  11. ↑ Michael Sheetz: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin aims to fly first passengers on its space tourism rocket as early as April . CNBC, January 14, 2021.
  12. ↑ Chris Gebhardt: SpaceX announces BFR lunar passenger, mission for Earth's artists. nasaspaceflight.com, September 17, 2018, accessed September 18, 2018 .
  13. ↑ Space Plane - Rocketing into the future. Astrium, archived from the original on August 7, 2011 ; accessed on February 5, 2013 .
  14. ↑ Michael Belfiore: It's a Rocket! It's a plane! It's ... Rocket Plane! Popular Science, January 8, 2006, accessed February 5, 2013 .
  15. ↑ Silvia Liebrich: Space flight at the discounter. Package travel into space. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. May 17, 2010, accessed January 13, 2021 .
  16. ↑ Bigelow Space Operations Announces it has Reserved up to Four Dedicated SpaceX Launches to the International Space Station. Bigelow Space Operatioons, June 7, 2019, accessed June 11, 2019 .
  17. ^ Jeff Foust: NASA releases ISS commercialization plan. In: Spacenews. June 7, 2019, accessed June 11, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Loren Grush: Bigelow's next-generation inflatable space habitat is shooting for the Moon . The Verge, September 13, 2019.
  19. ^ Jeff Foust: Bigelow Aerospace lays off entire workforce . Spacenews, March 23, 2020.
  20. ↑ Space Adventures: Circumlunar Mission. Archived from the original on October 18, 2017 ; accessed on October 16, 2017 (English): "We expect our first mission to launch before the end of the decade."
  21. ↑ "Novosti Kosmonawtiki": News ( Memento of August 22, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (Russian), August 10, 2006.
  22. ↑ RKK Energia tourists can fly around Moon in about three years - Lopota. Interfax, June 2, 2014, accessed June 3, 2014 .
  23. ↑ Космические туристы смогут встретить Новый год на орбите . RIA Novosti, April 20, 2020.
  24. ↑ Anatoly Zak: Russian space program in 2021 . Russian Space Web, accessed December 10, 2020.
  25. ↑ Коммерческий полет "Союза" на МКС планируется в 2022-2023 годах . RIA Novosti, April 27, 2020.
  26. ↑ Michael Sheetz: SpaceX to fly first mission to space with an all-civilian crew later this year . CNBC, February 1, 2021.