When I say booking tickets to space, the first name to strike your mind might be Elon Musk. Sorry to disappoint you, I am not even going to include his name in further sentences. Yes, you read it right. Apart from the advancement of SpaceX rockets and his lunar as well as Mars tourism endorsements, there's a lot of things to talk about in the Space Tourism commercialization front.
Starting from Yuri Gagarin's Vostok-1 launch to Christina Koch's longest stay in space, space travel has come a long way facing many crests and troughs. And now the bubbles of space tourism surfacing the public platforms are creating new peaks among the space enthusiasts. Space tourism is not new to this era. It has already been inaugurated and explored by the Russian Space Agency in the early 2000s. Dennis Titto, the first space tourist and an American entrepreneur bought the first-ever space travel ticket costing him a huge $20 million. In his 60th year, his childhood dream got fulfilled when he boarded a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space station in 2001 coordinated by Space Adventure Ltd. However, the RSA closed the space tourism program in 2010 even after executing many tourist missions due to an increase in the ISS crew size. From then onwards, many agencies and companies have been trying to successfully premier their space tourism endeavors.
Space travel is generally classified into three types. The first one is suborbital space travel, the second is orbital space travel and the last one is space travel beyond earth's orbit. Space tourism has pinned a lot of badges when it comes to suborbital space travel. But things are not that advanced in the other two segments. Many companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, Boeing, etc. are tightening their nuts and bolts to catapult tourists to the suborbital space. They have a promising portrayal of their plans for the near future.
Space tourism can be executed successfully, based on discrete phases.
Phase-1 would be proper space transportation. In these recent years, there's a heap of research and development in building a spacecraft or space vehicle. Spacecrafts come in different shapes and sizes. Apart from single-stage space vehicles, the two-stage space vehicles require a launch vehicle to get them to space. Launch vehicles can be rockets or planes based on the level of altitude, design, mission objectives. Rockets use solid and liquid propellants undergoing internal combustion in a rocket engine whereas airplanes use conventional wings along with the air-fuel mixture as propellants. Launch vehicles are generally attached to two kinds of crewed spacecraft, i.e. space capsules and space planes, for carrying human crew to space.
Space capsules being very economical and simplistic in designs are being used widely in different manned space missions. Early space missions like the Vostok program and Apollo program mostly used capsules for human space transports(cosmonauts from Russia or astronauts from America). Capsules are carried by multistaged rockets and are mostly orbital and beyond orbital in kind. The launch sequence includes different stages of separation of the rocket launchers. This is where a huge chunk of money gets wasted when the rockets fall back to the earth and become of no use.
SpaceX has done significant research in this field to reuse these separated rocket launchers (Falcon-9) by landing them properly back to the earth's crust. Falcon-9 is designed to take the 7 membered crew dragon reusable capsule to the orbit where it can latch onto a docking port in the ISS using a sophisticated automatic docking system. And at the same time, the falcon 9s can return back safely to earth. After completion of the mission, the crew Dragon capsule can detach from the station and reenter back to earth. Inturn a suite of parachutes can lower them gently to a known location in the ocean to be retrieved later by a SpaceX boat.
Similarly, Boeing is developing its own 7 membered crew capsule called the Boeing CST-100 Starliner which can be launched using multiple launch vehicles like the Atlas-V made by Lockheed Martin, Delta-4, Falcon-9, Vulcan Centaur, etc. The 100 in CST-100 is used in consideration of the Karman line (the virtual periphery of the earth's atmosphere). It promises to take at least 1 space tourist along with 5 astronauts under NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
Unlike SpaceX and Boeing, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin is developing a suborbital spacecraft with a fully reusable and Vertical Takeoff &Vertical Landing New Shepherd Propulsion Module carrying the New Shepard crew capsule. The crew capsule can take up to six members and can return from space using a parachute landing system while the propulsion module can get back safely once it ascends the crew module to suborbital space. Right now it is undergoing its testing phase.
Virgin Galactic is an American spaceflight company owned by the Virgin group, instead of capsules it uses spaceplanes named VSS Unity and the mid-air launching vehicle White knight to propel to suborbital space. The white Knight launcher as well as the VSS unity spaceplane are capable of doing traditional airplane landing in modified runways or sophisticated spaceports without any issue associated with capsule landing. These spaceplanes will be used in the earth-to-earth spaceflight as spaceliners boarding 6 passengers and 2 pilots. The system is in the developmental phase and can be used as the fastest transport in between developed cities.
SpaceX is also in the race for its own spaceliner using earth to earth Starship variant. Unlike supersonic jets, the single-stage hypersonic starship variant can travel up to 10,000 km at a speed of 25,000 Km/hr in between major cities of the Earth. The other multistage variants of starship are being developed to be used for moon and Mars missions. Floating super-heavy class spaceports will be used for all the starship variants making it a hub of suborbital, orbital, and beyond orbit space travel.
Orion Span is a USA-based company working in the development of a space hotel. Space hotels are basically space stations in earth's orbit revolving around the earth. Space stations are huge spacecraft with a huge capability of orbiting the planet as well as housing many crew members in space for several years down the line. Orion span has proposed such a space station called Aurora space station which will offer a one-time gathering of 6 members (2 professional members and 4 tourists) in the low earth orbit. A long 12 days stay for $9.5 Million per tourist including nonspace food and drinks, recreational activities will definitely give a hair tinkering experience to the boarded tourists.
Joint ventures in between (SpaceX and Axiom space), (Space adventure and SpaceX) are also boosting orbital space tourism programs. (Space Adventure and DSE Alpha) are also collectively working to execute a circumlunar mission to the moon with a price per passenger being $100,.000,000.
Phase-2 would be medical testing and basic training of a space tourist visiting space. It will be a tedious task to train the basic functioning and usage of spacecraft to a common space tourist. Spacecraft designers are required to rethink the interior design directly in interaction with the passengers.
Phase-3 would be the safety of the passengers inside the spacecraft.
If these 3 phases can be carried out properly then the future of space tourism will be on the brighter side. With the commercialization and globalization of such services, one-day booking tickets to space might become cheaper than conventional flight tickets.
Briefly saying, the future of space tourism is looking brighter than ever before. After privatizing the space exploration process, many big companies are putting a big chunk of their resources into the research and development of new modes of space transportation. In the 2020s we will be seeing the commercialization of suborbital space travel. It may so that we can buy a ticket to space just for recreation or it may be a hypersonic journey in a spaceliner to jump from one city to another. And there is a huge chance that orbital space exploration may boom. Perhaps there might be some space hotels (space stations basically) where we can book a 2 nights, 3days holiday (Although there won't be nights or days as it is in the earth's crust). The late 2020s might also gift us the endeavor to go beyond the earth's orbit. Lunar tourism is one of the big things endorsed by Musk in these recent years. Eventually, we can be interplanetary species after completing a mission to mars and the followingly ascending towards the mars tourism programs. In the coming 50 years or so, we can definitely see some huge leaps to different space boundaries. Habitation and colonization at different planets and natural satellites may become real too.
References:
1. Articles from NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Boeing, etc.
2. Wikipedia
3. Science Direct
4. Revfine
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