Space Tourism Companies — Who Are They, What Do They Do?

How far do they promise to take us?

People have been to outer space before so what’s new now? People who traveled into outer space earlier were professionals and a few civilians were part of certain missions but now it’s opening up as a business opportunity, taking travel and tourism to another level.

A few companies and billionaires have decided to put money, mind, and energy to explore space opportunities that would go beyond the tourism sector in the coming years. For now, let’s take a look at the companies that have already launched or are soon to launch their tourism services to the public.

Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Boeing, Axiom Space, and Space perspective are those major companies.

So how are these flights different from each other?

The curved trajectory such as that of a spaceflight around a planet is an orbit

Boeing, Axiom Space, and SpaceX are Orbital Flights — SpaceX also aims for lunar tourism and has successfully completed an orbital flight that carried a 4 member, an all-civilian team in spaceflight named “Inspiration4”.

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are Suborbital Flights. That is, they do not attain the speed needed for a flight to stay in the orbit and thus fall back to earth after making an arc. These flights are thus less expensive than orbital flights and make a return to the planet in a few hours as opposed to a few days taken in orbital flights.

Hot Air Balloon is not the correct representation of balloon-based spaceflight

Space Perspective is building a balloon-based flight to travel to the stratosphere which is about 32km above sea level.

Conclusion

I’m curious to learn a lot more about space technology and the opportunity it opens to all of us. In the coming days, I will be writing more on these topics as I explore more. If you are interested in the same subject, do not forget to follow me.