Is space tourism viable as a business?
NASA has studied the possibility of commercial space flight. One such study, released in 1998, suggested that space “cruises” could be a viable industry — worth tens of billions of dollars a year — if the cost of a ticket could be brought down to $100,000 US. But this same study showed that NASA would have to charge $10 million per ticket if they crammed 50 seats into a space shuttle — and that’s just to break even. Virgin Galactic unveiled the space vehicle The White Knight Two on July 28, 2008, at the hangar of Rutan’s Scaled Composites LLC, in California. (Virgin Galactic)However, there are private companies that are hoping to sell seats on shuttles making sub-orbital flights. Suborbital flights to heights of 100 km above the Earth require much less energy than the orbital flights undertaken by NASA’s space shuttles and Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. The International Space Station, for example, orbits at a distance of more than 350 km above the Earth. Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virg
