// ORBITAL LOGISTICS AND PROPULSION TERM
Space Tourism
Space tourism is the activity of paying to travel into space for recreational purposes, offering experiences beyond Earth's atmosphere.
TECHNICAL DEFINITION
Space Tourism is the commercial endeavor of providing suborbital or orbital spaceflights to private citizens for leisure, entertainment, or adventure, facilitated by companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin.
BACKGROUND
Space tourism is human space travel for recreational purposes. There are several different types of space tourism, including orbital, suborbital and lunar space tourism. Tourists are motivated by the possibility of viewing Earth from space, feeling weightlessness, experiencing extremely high speed, and contributing to science.
READ MORE ON WIKIPEDIASYNONYMS & ALIASES
- Commercial Spaceflight (Leisure)
- Civilian Space Travel
- Recreational Space Travel
USAGE NOTE
While currently expensive, space tourism aims to become more accessible as technology advances.
DEVELOPERS
Organizations developing technology related to Space Tourism.
Virgin Galactic is a spaceflight company developing commercial spacecraft and aims to provide suborbital spaceflights to space tourists. They offer multi-day experiences culminating in a flight to the edge of space.
Blue Origin is an American privately funded aerospace manufacturer and suborbital spaceflight services company. It is developing rockets for various applications, including space tourism with its New Shepard suborbital vehicle.
SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. While primarily focused on government contracts and satellite launches, SpaceX also offers orbital space tourism missions, such as Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn, using its Dragon spacecraft.
Space Perspective is developing Spaceship Neptune, a pressurized capsule lifted by a massive SpaceBalloon to the edge of space, offering a gentle, luxurious, and carbon-neutral space tourism experience without rockets.
World View Enterprises offers stratospheric tourism experiences using high-altitude balloons. Their 'Voyager' experience will lift a pressurized capsule to an altitude where passengers can view the curvature of the Earth and the blackness of space.
Orion Span was a company that announced plans to build Aurora Station, a luxury space hotel. While the project has been on hold or seemingly defunct, it represented an early commercial effort in orbital space tourism infrastructure.
Axiom Space is building the world's first commercial space station and provides crewed missions to the International Space Station for private astronauts, including those considered space tourists, as a precursor to their own station.