Space Tourism Industry Already Generating Revenue

One might expect that a fledgling industry such as this to be losing money. Afterall, dozens of companies are in research, development, testing, and construction phases of advancement, only one of them actually has an active service, and even then it is only one or two times a year. But it appears that this is not the case.

The Personal Spaceflight Federation recently released a study that showed that the space tourism industry earned $268 million in revenues in 2007. Not only that, but that was an increase from its previous revenues of $168 million in 2006! Any of you who might have been worried about the financial viability of the space tourism industry, I think we can put those fears to rest. Barring some kind of disastrous incident, things are only getting off the ground; just wait till SpaceShipTwo begins flight testing later this year!

Also reported were numbers like $1.2 billion in total investment in space tourism companies. Now it appears that some of the revenue is related to non-space-tourism services performed by some of these companies (Scaled Composites makes planes too, you know), but much of this is undoubtedly from sales of actual spaceflight tickets by Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic. You can read more about the report here.

Progress: 3.73%  Flight Time: 0:05:35