I've heard the idea of space tourism thrown around every once in a while, but I never seem to hear anything definite. After Google-searching for likely info, I find the majority of information about the subject is optimistic dreaming and conjecture.

I'd love to hear any hard-data anyone might know about it. Are there any immediate plans for privately owned and run space hotels, for instance? Is NASA considering anything along these lines to alleviate funding woes?


In my heart of hearts, I just want to have some solid reason to continue dreaming.

Hey, never never stop dreaming. :-)

If you've got $20 million, you can hop on a future Soyuz trip. So, that's legitimate space tourism IMO. Of course, that's outside the realm of everyone, so we need to wait for the prices some down.

Right now it's all speculative, but most of the X-Prize candidates will be targeting suborbital tourist flights as their primary source of income, so I think it's completely reasonable to expect tourist flights will be possible within the next decade. That said, they'll still be in the tens of thousands of dollars for a little while.

But, give it all time for the technology to become optimized and we'll see where it all goes. As soon as somebody, somewhere figured out a way to earn a profit from the exploration of space, then the whole industry is going to really take off.

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

Hi Atomic,

I am not sure how I got to this website, but if you want hope...here ya go! I believe the link was off of a banner from Universe Today (was it fraser?) but if this is an actual site that offers what it says it does, apparently Money talks, and it speaks of going to the edge of earth as just one adventure us "non astronauts" can experience.

Here is the site: http://www.incredible-adventures.com/

Thanks guys :-)

The X-prize looks marvellous. I'll be regularly checking out that site for news.

Hope springs eternal. I really must remember to check my other coat pockets for that 20 mill. ;-)

A little off topic, but it would sure be nice if someone were to pitch in a few million (Bill Gates you listening?) into the x-prize to make it a prize worth truly going for.

While 10 mil is ALOT of money, it is not enough to inspire real hardy competition like the prize for flying across the Atlantic was (Can't remember the name of that one, but it was $50,000 & Lindberg won it.) simply because the costs of designing & flying such a craft are significantly more than that.

Maybe I'll set up a collection jar :blink:

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All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.~ Carl Sagan ~

Humanity must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will we fully understand the world in which we live.~Socrates, 500 B.C. ~

Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him. ~Albert Einstein~

I agree. Can you imagine if it was $10 billion? You'd have a lot of competition. If a few world governments and multinational corporations chipped in and invested in what would be future space-tourism companies this thing could get off to a better start.

Kashi

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Climate Change Australia

Well, space tourism sounds great if only it would become a reality. We are told so many times how space tourism is going to be the next big business, but so far I haven't seen any progress.
I mean right now the only way anyone can get into space is when the government is involved.
Recently I've been hearing that governments won't invest for the next trip to the moon, but private companies who will co-operate and make it happen. But there is no action being done so far only talking.
X-prize may be a good start, but we have along way to go.

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Always has time for the stars

I know this is off topic, but with the rapid development of information technology and nanotech and quantum computing on the horizon, I doubt we will ever see space colonization or tourism in the sense that we have pictured it. Instead, we may be in for a totally different expoerience. Before we even get a chance to develop reliable inexpensive space technologies to drag us, our life-support and plumbing up there, we may be able to upload ourselves into a miniature nanobot with a quantum brain and travel the stars in little-bitty estes sized spacecraft!

OR, even be able to travel on a beam of light!

Anyways, it was just a thought.

I concur, great as something like the X-Prize was, the carrot at the end is simply not large enough to make that much of a difference. All the optimistic projections I see for so-called Space Tourism are IMO wildly optimistic. I would highly doubt prices would reach $10,000 (or inlfation adjusted level) for a trip even by 2040/2050. Of course, I hope to be proved wrong, its just that looking how far everything has gone over the last 40 years leads me in this train of thought.

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BugMeNot A portal to bypass free-site registration.

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer - renowned 19th Century German philosopher.

it was acturally 25,000$ i just did a project on him

Survey targets space tourism market
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14558671/
How much will customers pay for out-of-this-world experiences?

The Russian's charge about $15 million for a ticket to ride in a Soyuz seat

A quick search on Space.com produced these results on space tourism.

It appears there's more to it these days than "dreaming and conjecture."

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

Ooops!

I meant to include this, out yesterday, as well:

New Survey Takes the Pulse of Public Space Travel.

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

ofcourse this thread started back in 2003.

a lot has changed since then.

Must've been the rapid fire posting that day, which always leads to mistakes.

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

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