Space Tourism: One Small Step For Private Companies

Tamara Hinson examines why space exploration developments shouldn’t just be of interest to budding astronauts—they’re helping to overhaul our holidays, too.

- Tamara Hinson

In early May 2019 Blue Origin, the space exploration company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, successfully launched—and landed—the rocket Bezos plans to use for space tourism. Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson has said he hopes to start commercial space flights by the end of 2019. In recent years, international space agencies and private space exploration companies have made huge leaps forward in their efforts to explore beyond planet Earth. Another first was achieved in early 2019, when China's Yutu 2 rover became the first to explore the moon's far side.

This isn't just good news for those of us with a burning desire to visit the Moon, see our planet from space or set up camp on Mars—if you're a keen traveller, it's highly likely you'll eventually benefit from developments relating to space exploration. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, recently pointed out that, by travelling in a spaceship sent into orbit, an eight-hour flight in a cramped aeroplane could become a 30-minute hop, while the entire planet could be circumnavigated in just 90 minutes.

"It currently takes me 20 hours to get from Houston to Singapore," says Randy “Komrade” Bresnik, a NASA astronaut who recently served as Commander of the International Space Station. "But what if I could hop in a space plane and be there in 45 minutes?" Recent developments suggest such journeys might soon become reality, largely thanks to the number of privately-funded space exploration ventures, like Musk's SpaceX.