Greason: Space Tourism Costs Could Drop to Level of Cruise
Is Virgin Galactic heralding the space tourism age?
Seattle PI
Jeff Greason, vice chairman of the Commercial Space Flight Federation and president and chief executive of XCOR Aerospace, said space tourism would remain only for the rich for a while yet.
“I don’t think space flight, even suborbital space flight, is ever going to be quite as cheap as air travel is today,” he said. “But I can easily see it getting down to the point where at some point in the future — and, no, I’m not going to predict how soon that is because it’s too many steps ahead — I can see it getting down to the price of a cruise.”
As for getting beyond suborbital commercial flights, Greason said: “There certainly are roadmaps out there and technological plans out there, my own company among them, for how these systems will evolve over time to orbital systems where you can talk about (trips of) days or weeks or longer.”
This progression would move from suborbital craft to capsules on expendable rockets, he said. “It will take some time beyond that for fully reusable orbital systems to come along which will take us to a whole new level.”
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One response to “Greason: Space Tourism Costs Could Drop to Level of Cruise”
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“I can see it getting down to the price of a cruise.”
Well, if you count a jaunt with Virgin Galactic as the entry-level ticket, it’s already lower. You just have to carefully qualify what you mean by “a cruise”.
According to an article in Forbes, “The world’s most expensive cruise, and also one of the longest, is the 121 night around-the-world cruise in a grand suite on the Queen Elizabeth 2 that costs … $481,191.”
And: how much would it cost if the Queen Mary toured the world with paying occupants *only* in the grand suite, no other passengers? Maybe on the order of $12-$50M — just like orbital space tourism!
See? We’re already there!
Somehow, though, I don’t think this is what Greason meant. According to the same Forbes article, the average cruise is a little under $2000 for about a week of unwinding at sea. $10-$20/lb? I don’t think so. Not even for suborbital flight.
I think people have this idea that it’s got to be within the reach of everybody, potentially. But look how much it costs to go on an Antarctica X-C tour, or go cave-diving in Yucatan, or get taken along on a Himalayan climbing expedition. There are already a number of travel experience categories not easily within reach of (or well beyond) those of middling income in developed countries. Some of them are very adventurous, most others are (like the Queen Mary grand suite) simply very luxurious.
If there’s something that’s likely to distinguish space tourism as a recreation for the rich, it’s that there’s going to be no form of it that can be priced for anyone other than the rich. There are lots of cool mountaintops, snowfields and caves that an ardent enthusiast can reach with some time (years, often) put into effort and training and a little equipment. But there’s no cheap orbit — just a range of expensive ones. It’s just not in the nature of such destinations.