Watching the awe-inspiring reports from Artemis II, you may well have found yourself asking the obvious question: why can’t I go to space, too? Indeed, it’s now almost 25 years since the American entrepreneur Dennis Tito – on April 28, 2001 – became the first-ever paying customer to embark on a flight into space.
Tito’s venture – which involved joining the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TM-32 for a reported fee of $20m – sparked an insatiable interest in so-called space tourism: the idea that those with deep enough pockets could one day pay to venture up into the heavens, staring down at the Earth below.
Understandably, the world quickly got the space tourism bug. Within a few years of Tito touching back down on Earth, numerous dreamers and entrepreneurs had come forth with their visions to take amateur astronauts into space – including the space-enthusiast engineer Burt Rutan, the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and our own Sir Richard Branson.
You can’t blame the billionaires for dreaming. But 25 years later, where is the space tourism dream? Until the Covid pandemic, you could count the number of actual space tourists – non-professional astronauts who paid for their trip – on two hands, while Virgin Galactic had been hampered by costly delays and at least two fatal accidents.
Behind the scenes, though, progress was continuing, albeit some years behind schedule. Five years after a run of successful tests on its second spacecraft, VSS Unity, Virgin Galactic conducted its first fully crewed flight in the summer of 2021, with four passengers, including Sir Richard himself, on board.
Since then, Virgin Galactic has embarked on a further nine flights, taking some 31 passengers into space (including paying customers shelling out up to $450,000). Then, at the end of 2023, the company announced it would be grounding its operations in the summer, with Sir Richard sounding doubts about his ability to keep funnelling cash into the project.
The billionaire space race
It’s lucky, then, you might think, that Branson isn’t the only billionaire with an interest in space travel. Indeed, over the past decade, the field of space tourism has felt positively crowded – at least by previous standards – with the arrival of two other tycoon-backed endeavours: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
There’s no doubt Musk’s space company has made a new splash: such as sending the first non-professional astronaut to walk in space. But Mr “Colonise Mars” has shown less interest in the idea of off-the-peg commercial space tourism, preferring – perhaps rightly – to focus on pushing towards bolder and bigger ventures.
Then there’s Blue Origin, which has conducted 37 successful launches on its reusable sub-orbital New Shepard rocket. In total, the 60ft spaceship has taken more than 90 people, including, most recently, the pop star Katy Perry, into space. Earlier this year, though, the company announced it would be pausing the missions in order to expand its focus to lunar travel.
Space tourism for the masses?
What has gone wrong for space travel? One thing’s for sure, it certainly isn’t that the interest isn’t there. More than 600 people have already paid a deposit to go into space with Virgin Galactic. As you might expect, the industry is also benefiting from the ramped-up interest in space exploration in recent years.
“Artemis has put space back into the cultural zeitgeist,” says Roman Chiporukha, co-founder and chief executive of the US-based space travel agency SpaceVIP. “The focus is now on maintaining that momentum and continuing to build public understanding of why space matters.”
For all the utopian visions of space tourism for the masses, though, the truth is that the ventures that exist are a deeply elite pursuit, with more space tourists being either high-net-worth individuals (such as Jared Isaacman, the billionaire investor in SpaceX who has since been recruited by Donald Trump to lead NASA) or researchers and lifelong enthusiasts hand-picked by the companies leading the flights.
The price of a ticket to orbit
In fact, it turns out those private astronauts who paid $450,000 for a seat on a Virgin Galactic flight might be the lucky ones. The company has increased ticket prices ahead of its planned relaunch this year, with the entry cost now a dizzying $750,000.
That said, the company still intends to honour the prices paid by those “future astronauts” who bought their tickets years ago. “Virgin Galactic has been in contact with all of us who have already bought a ticket,” says Craig Curran, founder of New York-based travel agency DePrez, who has been on the waiting list since first buying his ticket in 2011.
Under its current plans, Virgin Galactic says it wants to be sending around 60 people per month into space from next year on its new Delta Class spacecraft. For the true believers, such as Mr Curran, it represents a significant step forward. “This is no longer about ‘proof of concept’ like the first VSS Unity flights; it’s about the commercialisation of space travel,” he says.
While Bezos’s Blue Origin doesn’t disclose its pricing structures – never a good sign for us budget-conscious types – most reports suggest previous passengers paid around $1m. Though at least one of them paid significantly more than that: when the company auctioned a seat on its first flight, a crypto bro paid $28m.
Sky-high prices have left space tourism dependent on a reasonably narrow market of ultra-high-net-worth types. That in itself might not be a problem. But among those who follow the industry, there’s a growing whisper that there might be another problem: the product just doesn’t have the follow-up market.
Four thrilling minutes
That isn’t to say space tourism isn’t thrilling. Those non-professional astronauts who have made the journey invariably come back gushing about the overview effect: the term given to the consciousness-melting feeling you get from looking down on the Earth. But does that mean they’d want to go again?
Virgin Galactic’s previous flights took around two hours, much of that time spent while the spacecraft was attached to its mothership as it climbed to the correct altitude. The flight would get within touching distance of the recognised border with space – known as the Kármán line – and then release its rocket.
For those first VSS Unity flights, the actual zero-gravity part – the sort of stuff you see astronauts doing in films – lasted around four minutes. Given they were launched from a ground rocket, the Blue Origin flights were even shorter in total: around 10 minutes from take-off to landing, with the passengers spending around four minutes in proper space.
That certainly didn’t stop some guests giving it the full “one small step for a man” treatment: the singer Katy Perry was ruthlessly mocked online for kissing the ground – a gesture usually associated with astronauts who have spent months on end in space – after her flight on Blue Origin last summer.
No doubt space tourism might have more momentum if it could expand the market a bit. But herein lies the other big problem: despite the eye-catching promises emerging from Beijing to Florida, no one has yet cracked the sweet spot of mass-market space travel.
The rockets that have taken private astronauts into space have required billions in upfront investment, with the operating costs for Blue Origin’s New Shepard reportedly running into nine figures per year. And while plenty of upstart ventures say they have already sold tickets for future space flights (such as a Chinese businessman who apparently paid $100,000), none have yet sent a rocket into space.
“If anyone knows how to make things cheaper, it’s Jeff Bezos”, was the optimistic verdict of one space tourism enthusiast I spoke to a few years ago – but so far, the much-coveted “economies of scale” have not come to pass. Not least as the space magnates seem to be focused on grander plans: such as Blue Origin’s pivot into lightning-speed satellite internet to power supercomputing projects back down on Earth.
Is it time to give up on the space tourism dream altogether, then? “From our side, interest is still there,” says David Doughty, director of UK space-focused travel agency RocketBreaks. “It tends to come from a very informed client base who understand the timelines and are happy to position themselves early for the right opportunity.”
In other words, there’s still some very exciting stuff going on, but it might be a long while before we everyday Earthlings can afford to take part.
Space tourism options in 2026
Virgin Galactic
Sir Richard Branson’s venture has reopened bookings for its upcoming suborbital flights on its new Delta-class spaceship in 2027. Price tag: $750,000 per seat
InterstellOr
The Chinese company is accepting bookings for its upcoming suborbital tourism flights, currently pencilled in for 2028. The firm has unveiled a full-scale version of its crew capsule, CYZ1. Price tag: $430,000
Space Perspective
The Florida-based company (recently acquired by Spain’s Eos X space) has been looking to develop a giant balloon-like capsule called the Spaceship Neptune to take passengers into the stratosphere. Price tag: $125,000