Expensive and hazardous space and other 'tourism'

WorldbyStorm

Jul 1

Wonder if the recent tragic events in the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of a submersible at the Titanic will have made any of those intending to avail of Virgin Galactic's rocket plane think again?

The first paying customers went up this Thursday.

Virgin becomes the latest commercial enterprise, along with Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and fellow billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX, catering to wealthy customers willing to pay large sums of money to experience the exhilaration of supersonic rocket speed, microgravity and the spectacle of the Earth's curvature from space.

It's incredibly expensive too:

It's a world away from the lumbering but safe subsonic aircraft that thread around the globe daily.Virgin Galactic has said it has already booked a backlog of some 800 customers, charging from $250,000 to $450,000 per seat, and envisions eventually building a large enough fleet to accommodate 400 flights annually.

I liked this on the RTÉ article about the successful flight this week:

Elon Musk's SpaceX meanwhile has collaborated with partner companies to send paying customers higher up, into Earth orbit or to the International Space Station.

But chartering a SpaceX rocket is a much more costly affair. Tickets for the ISS in joint SpaceX-Axiom Space missions are reported to run into tens of millions of dollars.

Much more costly? The distinction would be invisible to most of us.

And then there's the question as to how high is high enough. The Virgin Galactic rocket plane Unity goes 50 to 55 miles (80-89km) high:

Unlike Unity, Bezos has said, Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard rocketship tops the 62-mile-high-mark (100 km), called the Karman line, set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space.

Though conveniently:

Nasa and the US Air Force both define an astronaut as anyone who has flown 50 miles (80 km) high or more.

For all the talk of this being 'tourism' it really isn't.The level of risk is considerable - it has to be, this is essentially cutting edge technology. Granted there's regulation of the Virgin Galactic craft by US federal regulators. Yet it remains a world away from the lumbering but safe subsonic aircraft that thread around the globe daily. There's a revealing article here on such concerns from The New Yorker.

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