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The media space race recently launched by billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos has put space tourism back on track. At the center of the news. The first, founder of Virgin Galactic, Completed a suborbital flight on July 11, while the second, founder of Blue Origin and ex-boss of Amazon, Did the same a few days later, this July 20.
Beyond the battle of ego and images, symbolized by the communication coup made by Bezos by inviting the 82-year-old aviator, Wally Funk, to fly with him and thus to become the oldest person in space, the challenge remains above all economic. For both of them, it is a question of positioning themselves at the top of the future suborbital flight market.
Among the various tourist possibilities offered by space, suborbital flight is the most promising, because it is the least complex and the cheapest to perform. It consists in fact in going beyond the symbolic border of space, between 80 and 100 kilometers, for only a few minutes, the time to experience the weightlessness, the darkness of space and to observe the curvature of the Earth.
So nothing to do with a stay of several months in orbit like that of Thomas Pesquet, currently on board the International Space Station (ISS), at an altitude of 400 kilometers. In the field of adventure tourism, suborbital flight, because of its very short duration, its intensity and the level of perceived risk, is thus closer to bungee jumping than to a long stay in an extreme environment.
For Virgin Galactic, the successful SpaceShipTwo test flight is a preamble to the start of regular commercial operations, expected in 2022. Some 600 tickets worth 200,000 euros have already been sold and, in the long run, the company intends to make 400 flights a year.
On the side of Blue Origin, a first customer was already part of the crew of the flight carried out on July 20, since a seat had been auctioned and sold for 24 million euros. Thereafter, the ticket price should be around one million euros.
45 million for the ISS
Despite their high costs, suborbital flights remain much more accessible than the International Space Station, which has already welcomed seven tourists since its inauguration in 2001. All had booked their 10-day stay with Space Adventure, an American company acting as a tour operator, for around 45 million euros.
At such prices, space tourism is still very far from becoming mass tourism. Its positioning on an ultra-niche market thus calls for a strong perspective on the promises of a “space for all”.
As part of a techno-economic study that we carried out for the program “Objective Moon” from the National Association of Research and Technology (ANRT), we estimated potential space tourism market sizes by assuming that travel candidates would agree to devote up to 10% of their assets to the project, as did the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, in 2001.
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It appears that nearly seven million people in the world could afford a suborbital flight, while only 7,500 would have the means to stay on the ISS. The real market is obviously even smaller, in particular because beyond economic considerations, the long preparation and the level of physical fitness required limit the number of potential customers.
However, these figures could change positively as the costs of accessing space decrease, especially since the arrival of SpaceX on the market.. The reusability of launchers and capsules should make it possible to further reduce costs that have already been divided by three in recent years.
However, since the last flight of a tourist on board the ISS in 2009, it is not the price of the ticket, but the number of seats available in the launch vehicles that has prevented the development of orbital tourism. Indeed, after the withdrawal of American space shuttles, the Russian Soyuz became the only means of access to the ISS for astronauts from various space powers, so that it was no longer possible to embark tourists.
This situation has now been resolved, thanks to the arrival of a new American means of access to the ISS, the SpaceX Dragon Crew, so that tourists should return as early as this autumn, with no less than three missions planned.
Subsequently, the development of a second vehicle on the American side (Boeing CST-100 Starliner) foreshadows a strong development of tourist activities in low orbit, with dedicated Axiom commercial missions and a policy of making profitable use of the now vacant seats on Soyuz on the Russian side.
Objective (around the) Moon
In the longer term, a more distant destination may even emerge: the Moon. If the Moon landing is such a complex and expensive step — The Golden Spike Company announced a Ticket worth 750 million dollars in 2012 — that it remains difficult to imagine at the moment, the difficulty could be circumvented by offering overflights without staying on the surface, on the principle of the Apollo 8 mission.
The complexity of the necessary operations and infrastructures would then be significantly reduced, and the stay, lasting six days, could be offered at a price “comparable” to that of a flight on the ISS, according to Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX. The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has already bought a ticket for the first sightseeing flight around the Moon scheduled for 2023.
While waiting to land the Moon, space tourism will have to settle Sound major image problem. Reserved for a very small number of wealthy clients, it raises Strong criticism, in particular in terms of inequalities in greenhouse gas emissions.
Indeed, even if its total impact should remain marginal in one sector, tourism, which already accounts for 8% of global emissions, a Suborbital flight alone represents almost the entire budget of individual emissions per year to be respected in order to limit global warming to 2 °C.
While the “flygskam” (shame of flying, in Swedish) managed to get the forecasts revised downwards of growth in air traffic even before the start of the health crisis, will space one day welcome more tourists than scientists, like the polar regions or Everest? The citizen debate, provided it takes up this subject hitherto abandoned to a handful of enthusiastic billionaires, undoubtedly holds part of the answer.
This article is re-published from The Conversation