Friday, March 28, 2008

Space Tourism Viability

Let me take a break from all this new space tourism news for a moment, and voice some thoughts on the viability of the space tourism industry.

While researching some of this week's space tourism news, I ran into this article from space.com. Of particular interest to me is a sentence near the bottom where they talk about Virgin Galactic:

"Tai said Virgin Galactic has collected $31 million in deposits from future suborbital space travelers."

$31 million? Think about that; that's incredible! Virgin Galactic is accepting deposits for spaceflight tickets anywhere from $20,000 to the full price of $200,000. That means at least 155 people (and likely well over 300) have already committed tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchasing a flight aboard a spacecraft that has yet to be completed and has never been flown. That's impressive! Can you imagine the onslaught of additional people who will commit to a flight once the first test flights occur? Or once the first actual tourist flights occur? As long as no major disasters happen, my feeling is that the space tourism market is going to be bulging with people clamoring for a flight.

But I'm an optimist like that.

Progress: 3.89%  Flight Time: 0:05:50

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