Abstract In order to provide a basis for assessing the future prospects and challenges of space tourism, this paper begins with a brief overview of the history of space tourism. This is followed by a discussion on market demand and current developments in the academic community, as well as the status of traffic tools, regulations and legalization. In market demand, although studies conducted in 1990s assumed the possibility of 500,000 per year in space tourists and several billion USD of annual revenue, in 2008 a relatively modest 13,000 per year was predicted. At this time traffic transport tools including the Soyuz system, CST-100, DragonRider and International Space Station (ISS) can only provide a few tens in spare seats for space tourists per year compared to the projected 20,000 plus seat capacity of the Lynx, Dream Chaser and SpaceShipTwo (SS2) fleets, which have the potential to conduct their first full suborbital test flight and first commercial flight within the coming decade. Added to this, the US government has only a regulatory regime that supports privately owned suborbital space tourism (SST) and no government funded orbital space tourism (OST). These evidences reveal a very high and advantageous potential for SST to form a space tourism industry in the coming decade, whereas the possibility of OST is relatively low. However, even though the prosperity of SST in the coming years is expectable, its maturity, reliability and safety still need to win the confidence of the general public. For examples, the announcement of changes to fuel used in the SS2 rocket engine in May 2014 and the crash of one SS2 while performing test flight on 31 October 2014 indicated the need for much careful preparation, as any accident in commercial operation could seriously damage or even kill its future prospects.

    Highlights Orbital space tourism (OST) started in 2001 since D. Tito traveled to ISS. Suborbital space tourism (SST) is under development with Lynx and SS2 in test. Fuel change to SS2׳s engine announced in May 2014 caused extensive time delay. USA had put in place a regulatory regime to support the SST and not the OST. Scrupulous planning and preparation is essential to SST׳s future prospects.


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    Title :

    The first decade of commercial space tourism


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Acta Astronautica ; 108 ; 79-91


    Publication date :

    2014-12-08


    Size :

    13 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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