An adventure on the horizon, reports John Loizou

Current studies estimate that there will be approximately 1,000 space tourists per year by early in the next decade. The market for sub-orbital travel may reach nearly £500m by 2021, but it is still some way from an immediate business opportunity offering affordable space travel to all.

It is currently feasible only for the very wealthy enthusiast, and activity is occurring predominantly in the US. The success of space tourism (or personal spaceflight, the industry’s preferred name for it) depends upon a mass demand from potential travellers and the participation of industrial and financial partners throughout the world.

Orbital space tourism, for which there is presently only the option of a £10m trip to the International Space Station, demonstrates continued demand. However, it is personal spaceflight at the lower end of the cost scale which is likely to develop significantly over the coming years.

Sub-orbital flight

In October 2004, SpaceShipOne met the challenge of the $10 million (£5.4m) Ansari X PRIZE(1) to produce the world’s first affordable and re-useable spacecraft for sub-orbital flights. It was followed by Sir Richard Branson launching Virgin Galactic, a company looking to build and profit from the new space tourism industry.

Virgin Galactic are currently charging approximately £100,000, whilst Space Adventures are marketing trips for a mere £55,000. These consist of short-duration sub¬orbital flights which give passengers a brief experience of weightlessness. Unlike Virgin’s offering, passengers on Space Adventures’ Russian-developed Explorer vehicle will not be able to leave their seats. Virgin Galactic’s market research identified that the full experience of weightlessness is vital to the majority of their potential customers and so their approach is designed to allow passengers to float free for five minutes, before being automatically returned to their couches for the re-entry and return to land.

To become a feasible commercial venture, sub-orbital space tourism requires technological breakthroughs that improve safety to at least the level of early commercial aviation, which is at least 100 times safer than current spaceflight. Whilst the required technologies do not exist for human orbital spaceflight, they do exist today for suborbital trips, as demonstrated by SpaceShipOne.

Legal barriers

As well as the technical hurdles, there are a number of other barriers. Personal spaceflight throws up legal issues that have never been properly considered before. Where does the regime for aviation law end and space law begin? Is a vehicle carried aboard an aircraft and launched at 50,000 ft to climb out of the atmosphere powered by a rocket before gliding back to land on a normal runway an aeroplane, a spacecraft or just an extreme form of fairground attraction?

Even if the legal definitions can be clarified, the insurance industry doesn’t yet know how to handle such a hybrid creature. Aviation and space launch vehicles have entirely different approaches to insurance of the craft itself, while third party liability and passenger liability issues have never been seriously considered previously for trips into space.

What’s the point?

If it’s technically incredibly challenging, legally complex and astronomically expensive, why is anyone seriously considering personal spaceflight as a commercial opportunity?

The best answer has come from Brian Binnie, test pilot of SpaceShipOne and one of only three people ever to have earned gold ‘Astronaut Wings’ by flying themselves into space, rather than being strapped onto a rocket flying under automated control. Mr Binnie is currently supporting development of the ‘VS Enterprise’ rocketplanes ordered by Virgin Galactic, and he gave an impression of how it would feel to be a passenger on such a craft, when the rocket motor shuts off after two minutes of powered flight:

…You literally step across a threshold into another realm, where beauty and blessed peace and quiet reign, graced by the instant karma of weightlessness. And, my God, that view! The black, foreboding void that is space is magically revealed as if someone has pulled back a stage curtain for your eyes only. This vast presence, looming and yawning through the windows, offers both menace and mystery.

Below is a reassuring comfort — a 1,000 mile horizon that reveals a magnificent splendour of mountain ranges, coast lines and weather patterns normally only seen on the evening news. And separating space from Earth is an improbably thin, bright, electric-blue ribbon that is the atmosphere…

That’s the point. That’s why hundreds of people have already paid huge sums of money to book their seats. In the next few years more and more of us will be facing a difficult dilemma: children’s inheritance, or a trip into space?

Reference

1. See the X PRIZE Foundation website for more information about the Ansari X PRIZE.

Dr John Loizou is the Manager, Systems Engineering at VEGA Group PLC. He chaired a recent Royal Aeronautical Society conference entitled, ‘pace Tourism: From Lofty Dreams to Commercial Reality’