Zuzanna Kościuk The Realities of Space Tourism

Have you ever thought of spending your holiday in spacespacespace? Well, if you’re wealthy enough, you can become a space tourist. What’s space tourism? How does it work? How much does it cost? Read on to find out.

In short, space tourism is recreational space travelrecreational space travelrecreational space travel. Space tourists are people who can afford to pay extremely high prices to travel into the Earth’s orbit for fun. In reality, most of them never actually leave Earth, but they reach space. Such trips are called sub‑orbitalsub‑orbitalsub‑orbital space flightsspace flights [space flight]space flights. Sub‑orbital means that you never leave Earth’s gravitygravitygravity. Sub‑orbital space flights usually launchlaunchlaunch, reach an altitude higher than 100 km, and then experience a free fallfree fallfree fall.

A tourist spacecraftspacecraftspacecraft shuts offshuts off [shut off]shuts off its enginesengines [engine]engines before reaching the 100 km mark, so the tourists can experience weightlessnessweightlessnessweightlessness. The entire sub‑orbital trip takes no more than an hour. And the cost? Approximately 250,000 thousand dollars per ticket. This means that very few people can afford a sub‑orbital space flight. In fact, only eight commercial passengerscommercial passengers [commercial passenger]commercial passengers have taken a sub‑orbital trip so far, but a few companies are working to make space tourism more popular.

What if you’re not satisfied with simply reaching space? If you’re wealthy enough, you can experience orbitalorbitalorbital space flight. In other words, you can fly to the International Space StationInternational Space StationInternational Space Station. As of today, only one company offers trips to orbit. The price? Twenty million dollars. The prices are so high because space tourism is still quite a new area. However, a few more companies plan to revolutionise space travel and make it more accessibleaccessibleaccessible to all people. There’s talk of reaching the Moon and even Mars. For now, however, those are just plans.

How do you become a space traveller? You already know that you have to be very wealthy to pay for your space tripspace tripspace trip. But money is not enough. You will have to be trained just like real astronauts. Sometimes space travellers carry out scientific experiments for NASA!

Although space tourism still sounds like something from a science‑fiction novel, it is the reality now. Just be patient and perhaps one day you will be able to go on a spece trip, too.

1 Źródło: Zuzanna Kościuk, licencja: CC BY-SA 3.0.