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For the average Earthling, touring space may still be the stuff of science fiction, but in 2000, Popular Science published a story by contributing writer Dan Cray, predicting that such luxury vacations might be available as soon as 2007. A lot of things had to go right to get space tourism off the ground, especially in such a short timeframe. Nearly a quarter of a century later, we’ve made some progress, but 2007 was uber-optimistic even for the uber-wealthy.
The hype and excitement began about a decade earlier, in 1990, when Japanese journalist Toyohiro Akiyama became the first civilian to travel to space. The eight-day mission, dubbed Mir Kosmoreporter, ferried Akiyama on a Soviet Soyuz rocket to the Mir space station. Akiyama’s ticket was funded by the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), who paid the Soviets an undisclosed amount, but likely more than $12 million. Akiyama’s nightly broadcasts during his stay weren’t exactly glowing reviews for space tourism, although TBS did enjoy an initial bump in viewership and ratings. In December 1990, The New York Times called Akiyama space’s antihero: “Mr. Akiyama spent a lot of time [during nightly broadcasts] describing the uglier details of space sickness. A chain smoker, he repeatedly longed for a cigarette. His brain, he complained, felt as if it was ‘floating around in my head.’ Told to pack light, he failed to bring along enough underwear.”
In 2001, several months after Cray’s Popular Science article, US venture capitalist Dennis Tito, who worked for NASA early in his career, would become the second civilian to escape Earth’s tug, and the first American space tourist. The price tag: $20 million.
If Akiyama’s week-long beat as a cosmonaut ignited the fuse for space tourism by demonstrating civilians could travel to space, it was the anticipation of Tito’s trip that gave it oxygen a decade later. “Space enthusiasts say the resulting publicity promises to spark the interest of investment capitalists,” Cray wrote, referring to Tito’s upcoming space odyssey. At the time, more than half a dozen space tourism companies and organizations, which had sprung up in the 1990s, were already forecasting rosy business trajectories in the coming decade despite no track record of delivering anything or anyone to space.
Some space tourism enthusiasts, like Buzz Aldrin—the celebrated American astronaut who followed Neil Armstrong onto the Moon’s surface in July 1969—focused their efforts on developing affordable means to get to space. Aldrin founded ShareSpace in 1998 to promote space tourism as something for everyone, not just the ultrarich. He also founded Starcraft Boosters in 1996 to design reusable booster rockets, developing rudimentary hardware for NASA.
Jeffrey Manber—an entrepreneur who still works at the forefront of space missions, currently as an executive at Voyager Space—served as CEO of MirCorp. MirCorp was a private joint venture formed in the 1990s between the US and Russia to commercialize access to Russia’s Mir space station before it was deorbited in 2001.
Other enthusiasts focused on hospitality. Robert Bigelow, founder of the terrestrial Budget Suites hotel chain, set his sights and deep pockets on developing inflatable space habitats, launching Bigelow Aerospace in 1999. The Space Island Group, founded by Gene Meyers in the mid-1990s, drew up plans to convert spent US space shuttle fuel tanks into habitats. Space Island Group’s designers proposed leaving empty 747-sized shuttle fuel tanks in orbit, where they could be refurbished into dwellings.
Since vacationing in space comes with unique logistical challenges, Virginia-based Space Adventures, founded in 1998, recognized that wealthy private citizens would need help coordinating their trips, negotiating with space agencies, and preparing for their zero-gravity getaways. In 1996, the Space Tourism Society sought to create a community of like-minded enthusiasts to share resources, attend conferences, and attract sponsors.
With few exceptions, like Space Adventures and the Space Tourism Society, most of the companies and organizations that formed in the 1990s to pursue space tourism are either defunct or have changed their mission to something less ambitious. ShareSpace now offers educational resources for school children, and Bigelow Aerospace has been inactive since 2019. But in their wakes, a new slew of companies have filled the space tourism vacuum. Mostly founded by billionaires and international aerospace companies, the new generation have much deeper pockets and resources than their predecessors, making space tourism seem a lot more likely—for space-yachting billionaires, at least.
In the last two decades, rocket launch companies have sprung up across the globe, tripling the number of orbital launches since 2000, mostly to install satellites. SpaceX even made news recently by returning a large booster to its launchpad. Reusable rockets had been a space tourism affordability prerequisite cited by 1990s experts like Aldrin.
In 2024, Earthlings also witnessed the first commercial space walk by a private citizen—billionaire Jared Isaacman. But his sensational debut wasn’t exactly a harbinger of a budding space tourism industry. By some estimates, Isaacman paid an astronomical $200 million for the privilege to walk in space—hardly a price tag that would spur demand even for the ultrarich.
Today, space tourism companies fall into either the orbital or suborbital variety. On suborbital trips, like those offered by Virgin Galactic, founded by Sir Richard Branson in 2004, and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company, the spacecraft travels to where space starts and Earth’s atmosphere ends, about 60 miles above sea level. Because the spacecraft never enters a stable orbit, which would require traveling another 40 miles to enter Low Earth Orbit, the journeys are short—a couple hours round trip. Still, passengers get to see Earth clearly and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.
As the name suggests, orbital space tourism involves taking passengers into orbit. As of September 2024, SpaceX had launched five commercial flights, delivering private citizens for short stays either on the International Space Station or in Low Earth Orbit. It was SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission that enabled Isaacman to become the first private citizen to walk in space. Space Adventures, which is one of the few 1990s space tourism companies still around, has facilitated several private citizen flights, connecting clients with orbital missions, primarily on Roscosmos, Russia’s space flight program.
Space tourism today is as replete with grand visions and ideas as it was a quarter century ago. Blue Origin, for instance, has drawn up plans for an Orbital Reef, a commercial, mixed-use destination for “commerce, research, tourism, and more,” according to its website. Space Adventures is already promoting circumlunar missions: “We will take you to within a few hundred kilometers of the Moon’s surface,” they advertise. “You will see the illuminated far side of the Moon, and then witness the amazing sight of the Earth rising above the surface of the Moon.” The catch? There is no mission yet planned to circle the Moon other than NASA’s crewed Artemis II mission in 2025.
The space tourism industry may still suffer from a supernova-sized helping of hype, as it did twenty-five years ago, but today there are many more companies with more resources, and a growing track record of successful commercial flights.
If there’s a silver lining to the excessive hype, Americans have no expectation that they’ll be shuttling off to space resorts anytime soon, or taking luxury tours of the Moon. Besides Space Adventures, travel companies are just not clamoring to enter the space tourism business. And while a 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that 55 percent of Americans do expect space tourism to become routine, they don’t expect it to be available to the masses for another half century. Unless you have a $100 million or so to spare, off-world vacations still seem, well, a long way off.
