Tag: tourism

Space Tourism

Cottage industries on top of Virgin Galactic. Cute.

Loretta and George Whitesides plan to be the first couple to honeymoon in space. The sub-orbital spaceflight will launch the couple over 100 km high, past the boundary of space. The flight will include several minutes of weightlessness, a view of the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth.

2007-04-10: Space Adventures Lunar Mission

The first private expedition to the moon. Price – $100m By joining the Space Adventures Lunar Mission you will contribute to the dawning of a new era in space exploration and enter the history books alongside the great explorers of our time.

2007-06-29: Space Hotel with space-based bingo. oy

the company has sent a collection of pictures and other memorabilia from fee-paying customers keen to see their personal possessions photographed in space.” The company “also hopes to activate a space-based bingo game to be played by people back on Earth.”


2007-08-01: Galactic Suite space hotel

$4M for a 3 day stay. During that time guests would see the sun rise 15x a day

2008-01-26: 90% can do suborbital

NASTAR reckons that more than 90% of the population could handle a sub-orbital flight. Nor does Mr King see any reason why children as young as 5 or 6 could not go too.

2013-02-21: Mars tourists. You gotta wonder when the ambitions of a moderately wealthy (think 100Ms, not Bs) individual exceed the ambitions of all nations. Conclusion: things are run by luddite lawyers and the sooner people like Tito succeed, the sooner hope returns to humanity.

The Inspiration Mars Foundation, a newly formed nonprofit organization led by American space traveler and entrepreneur Dennis Tito plans to take advantage of a unique window of opportunity to launch an historic journey to Mars and back in 501 days, starting in January 2018.

2017-02-27: Moon Tourism

SpaceX has been approached to fly 2 private citizens on a trip around the moon late next year. They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission. Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration. Spacex expects to conduct health and fitness tests, as well as begin initial training later this year. Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest and Spacex expects more to follow. Additional information will be released about the flight teams, contingent upon their approval and confirmation of the health and fitness test results.

2018-09-17: Moon Junket

I choose to go to the Moon, with artists. If Pablo Picasso had been able to see the moon up-close, what kind of paintings would he have drawn? If John Lennon could have seen the curvature of the Earth, what kind of songs would he have written? If they had gone to space, how would the world have looked today? People are creative and have a great imagination. We all have the ability to dream dreams that have never been dreamt, to sing songs that have never been sung, to paint that which has never been seen before. I hope that this project will inspire the dreamer within each of us. Together with Earth’s top artists, I will be heading to the moon… just a little earlier than everyone else. I am truly blessed by this opportunity to become Host Curator of “#dearMoon”. I would like to thank Elon Musk and SpaceX for creating the opportunity to go around the moon in their BFR. I would also like to thank all those who have continuously supported me. I vouch to make this project a success. Stay tuned!

2019-02-01: Commercial Human Space

Let’s start with low-key suborbital space tourism, of the type Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin would like to offer. Some economists see this as fairly feasible: If we know 1 thing about the world, it’s that some subset of the population will always have too much money and will get to spend it on cool things unattainable for the plebs. If such flights become routine, though, their price could go down, and space tourism could follow the trajectory of the commercial aviation industry, which used to be for the wealthy and is now home to Spirit Airlines. Some also speculate that longer, orbital flights—and sleepovers in cushy 6-star space hotels (the extra star is for the space part)—could follow.

After there’s a market for space hotels, more infrastructure could follow. And if you’re going to build something for space, it might be easier and cheaper to build it in space, with materials from space, rather than spending billions to launch all the materials you need. Maybe moon miners and manufacturers could establish a proto-colony, which could lead to some people living there permanently.

2019-08-23: Von Braun Station

The Goal of Gateway Foundation Von Braun Station is to build a dual-use station that is economically self-sustaining. They plan a larger Gateway Spaceport with 11M cubic meters of pressurized volume versus 931 meters for the International space station. This would be a 12000x larger volume.

Blue Origin

mr bezos new space venture. bringing rocket-powered space exploration to the masses.
2015-11-24: not a bad way for blue origin to come out of stealth mode, but this is no spacex so far.

2016-09-18:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos would like to see a fully colonized solar system. Bezos also has a rocket company Blue Origin and he has helped fund General Fusion. Blue Origin moves toward its goal of having “millions of people living and working in space,” the company has launched and landed the same rocket 4x in a row, an unprecedented feat aimed at ultimately lowering the cost of space travel. By 2018, it plans to fly tourists on short jaunts past the edge of space in capsules designed with large windows.

“I wish there were a trillion humans in the solar system. Think how cool that would be. You’d have a 1000 Einsteins at any given moment—and more. There would be so much dynamism with all of that human intelligence. But you can’t do that with the resources on Earth or the energy on earth. So if you really want to see that kind of dynamic civilization as we expand through the solar system, you have to figure out how to safely move around and use resources that you get in space.”

“I think NASA should work on a space-rated nuclear reactor. If you had a nuclear reactor in space– especially if you want to go anywhere beyond Mars, you really need nuclear power. Solar power just gets progressively difficult as you get further away from the sun. And that’s a completely doable thing to have a safe, space-qualified nuclear reactor.”

and

Rumors circulate of Bezos stepping back from his chief executive role at Amazon. He wants to spend more than the 1 day a week he works on Blue Origin

“I’m perfectly willing to fund this for as long as is required. There are way easier ways to make money. You don’t go through the list of best risk-return possibilities and find spaceflight. That’s not it. The reason you do this is because you’re a missionary for this. You’re passionate about it.”

2018-04-26:

SpaceX has growing revenue which is crushing Amazon stock funded Blue Origin. Blue Origin new Glenn rocket might be flying by 2020 and could have 3 to 8 commercial flights by 2023. By the end of 2020, SpaceX should have 100 more commercial launches and by 2023 will have 200+ commercial launches and should be flying the SpaceX BFR.

2018-10-05:

Blue Moon is a robotic space cargo carrier and lander design concept for making cargo deliveries to the Moon. Designed by Blue Origin, and as of 2018 planned to be operated by Blue Origin, on a mission aimed for 2024. Blue Moon benefits from the vertical landing technology heritage used in Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket. The lander is planned to be capable of delivering 4500 kilograms to the surface of the Moon. The cargo vehicle could also be used to support NASA activities in cislunar space, or transport payloads of ice from Shackleton Crater to support space activities. Blue Origin began development work on the lander in 2016, publicly disclosed the project in 2017, and unveiled a mockup of the Blue Moon lander in May 2019.

2021-10-02 update, it appears they’re trying to cut corners:

Safety concerns about Blue Origin’s New Shepard crewed suborbital flight, which took place on 20 July, were dismissed in an atmosphere that discourages dissent and free discussion. At Blue Origin, a common question during high-level meetings was, “When will Elon or Branson fly?” Competing with other billionaires—and “making progress for Jeff”—seemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule. In the opinion of an engineer who has signed on to this essay, “Blue Origin has been lucky that nothing has happened so far.” Many of this essay’s authors say they would not fly on a Blue Origin vehicle. And no wonder—we have all seen how often teams are stretched beyond reasonable limits. In 2019, the team assigned to operate and maintain one of New Shepard’s subsystems included only a few engineers working long hours. Their responsibilities, in some of our opinions, went far beyond what would be manageable for a team double the size, ranging from investigating the root cause of failures to conducting regular preventative maintenance on the rocket’s systems.

Out of Office

In a way my month off has already started – prompted by visiting family, time off in the Japanese Alps and coastal ryokan. There’s nothing like the clarity that comes from watching the sun rise over the Pacific (in Izu above) or waking up above the clouds to put life, the universe and (more humbly) my research into perspective. That these mornings yield a disproportionate share of big ideas is merely a bonus.

jan has the coolest job in the world. and he is moving on. WTF?