JOURNEY TO THE BEYOND

Space tourism with its challenges and excitement, currently accessible only to billionaires, holds the potential to expose a wider set of people to the views of earth's horizon and zero-g experiences in the future

- AYUSHEE CHAUDHARY

RECENTLY, BLUE ORIGIN COMPLETED ITS SEVENTH HUMAN spaceflight and the 25th flight for the New Shepard programme. The flight carried astronauts Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller, Gopi Thotakura, and former Air Force Captain Ed Dwight. Dwight, who was selected as the nation's first Black astronaut candidate, never had the opportunity to fly until now at the age of 90. His flight was an example of the expanding possibilities of people going to space. With this flight, New Shepard has flown a total of 37 people into space.

The journey aboard Blue Origin's spacecraft lasted about ten minutes. While this was one of the shortest trips to space, this flight restarted the conversation around space tourism, its charm, its feasibility, etc. This flight was a sub-orbital spaceflight, which crossed the Karman line, the 100 km boundary of space, before descending back to Earth. Most current space tourism offerings are similar sub-orbital flights, but longer journeys are also available, including orbital flights that can involve spending days on the International Space Station (ISS). The first space tourist, Dennis Tito, spent over seven days on the ISS in 2001. According to NASA, the first private astronaut mission to the station was Axiom Space's Axiom Mission-1 that carried four astronauts aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft named Endeavour. 13 private visitors, known as spaceflight participants, from seven countries have visited the orbital outpost.