Video: Why Hasn’t Space Tourism Taken Off?
Video Caption: Listening to Richard Branson over the past 20 years, you’d be forgiven for assuming that space was by now being frequented by lots of tourists. However, despite the Virgin Galactic chief’s optimism, the space tourism industry has yet to take off. Up to now there have been only seven self-funded citizens in space. And with billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the space race, why are there still no tourists in space?
3 responses to “Video: Why Hasn’t Space Tourism Taken Off?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
About what I expected – space is hard and expensive, and those don’t go well with tourism.
Although in Virgin Galactic’s case, it didn’t help that they got sucked into the trap of air launch space planes.
The Ansari X-Prize was one of the major factors as it turned the development away from practical craft to stunt vehicles like SpaceShipOne to win the prize. Than once a winner was announced and picked by Virgin Galactic venture funding basically disappeared for all the “losers”. This basically killed off the competition and eliminated any pressure for the “winner” VG to really push forward with more practical designs such as a upgraded SpaceShipOne. All in all the Ansari X-Prize probably set the space tourism industry back by a good 10-15 years over what likely would have happened without it.
The difference between a professional “astronaut” and a “private” citizen like Christa Mcauliffe was/is and always will be just semantics. A mission/payload specialist on the shuttle was just a passenger, several privately employed by the likes of RCA. The job of school teacher is indistinguishable from a payload/mission specialist with regards to operation of the crewed spacecraft.