Bold dreams of traveling to space thanks to the development of private companies and the latest technologies are becoming a reality not only for multimillionaires.
Travel up to 100 km from the earth’s surface is offered by Virgin Galactic British billionaire Richard Branson and Blue Origin American Jeff Bezos. The cost of a suborbital tour is 450 thousand dollars. Another player in the space tour operator market – the American concern Boeing – is developing an unmanned passenger capsule Starliner, its test flight will take place in 2022.
Plans to send tourists into orbit also Elon Musk’s SpaceX. At the same time, the world-famous billionaire, engineer and inventor, who was awarded the membership of the Royal Society of London for his services to science, plans not to limit himself to creating a “space taxi.”
On May 30, 2020, SpaceX successfully launched two NASA astronauts into orbit for the first time in history on the private spacecraft Crew Dragon. Now the company Ilona Mask is preparing for the orbital flight of the reusable transport system Starship – by far the largest rocket in the world. The system may enter orbit in January 2022. This will happen if SpaceX has time to complete the construction of an appropriate launch pad in Texas.
Space Adventures, the first space tour operator in history, is also going to resume tourist flights on Russian ships. In May 2021, the company announced the start of preparations for the flight to the ISS, Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Jozo Hirano on the Soyuz MS-20 ship. The flight is scheduled for December 2021. Pre-flight training takes place at the Cosmonaut Training Center named after Yu.A. Gagarin. In addition, Space Adventures is negotiating with potential space tourists who are ready to fly to the ISS on Soyuz and go into outer space.
It is planned to place tourists on the ISS. It is too early to talk about comfort and luxury services, although many companies have been working on the concept of space hotels for more than 50 years. One of the first to present his project was Barron Hilton back in 1967. Given the successes achieved by modern space conquerors, flights to the moon, walks in outer space and weekends in an orbital hotel no longer seem like an impossible dream.