Space Tourism

Virgin Galactic has declared its Gateway to Space building at Spaceport America "operationally functional" as company officials unveiled the interior of the facility that will act as both Mission Control and the departure/arrival lounge for space tourists.

​​If Elon Musk’s palms were sweaty during any SpaceX rocket launches of late, just imagine eight famous cultural icons were strapped in for the ride. "We will be doing everything we possibly can to make sure that is a good flight," the CEO said today, and not in a hypothetical sense.

​SpaceX is forging ahead with its plans to launch tourists into space, today announcing that it has signed a contract with an unknown individual who will become the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon.

​Virgin Galactic has shown the first firing of its spaceplane’s chemical rocket engine was no fluke, following last month’s effort with another successful outing In California. The latest test flight takes the tourist-carrying space vehicle a little closer to space, literally and figuratively.

Space tourism has been long touted as 'coming soon', but the only opportunity to buy your way into space were rare private trips to the International Space Station with price tags of US$20 million. Now Orion Span has revealed Aurora Station space hotel, promising an ambitious 2022 opening date.

World View came a step closer to carrying tourists to the edge of space as it completed a major milestone test flight last weekend of its one-tenth scale version of the Voyager craft.

Plans are afoot to establish a spaceport in Australia. The town of Rockhampton in Queensland is one of three locations currently being considered as a potential site for the base which would focus primarily on space tourism.

Even though the investigations into the SpaceShipTwo incident are only beginning, there are those who already claim that Sir Richard Branson’s dream of sending tourists on suborbital flights into space is as dead as the Hindenburg. But is it?

With a judging panel made up of former NASA astronauts, industry experts, space enthusiasts, and others, a competition being run by Spaceship Earth Grants (SEG) aims to give away one space flight for every 50,000 applications it receives.

Arizona-based World View Enterprises has successfully completed its first test flight of a space tourism balloon that, for the price of US$75,000 per person, will lift six passengers into the stratosphere to an altitude of 20 miles (32 km).

With a projected settlement date of 2025, the Mars One project has received over 200,000 applications for the one way trip to the Red Planet. Bryan Versteeg is a conceptual designer who’s been working with the Mars One team in anticipation of the planet’s eventual colonization.

Individuals who dream of becoming astronauts will soon be able to buy training for exactly that purpose. Spaceflight training provider Waypoint 2 Space has been awarded safety approval by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for its training programs that are due to begin this year.