Space Tourism Coming Soon...

2019 could very well mark a new beginning for the travel industry…

Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, and Blue Origin, by Amazon creator Jeff Bezos, are racing to be the first to finish their tests—with both companies using radically different technology and launch tourists into space.

Neither Virgin nor Blue Origin's passengers will find themselves orbiting the Earth: instead, their weightless experience will last just minutes. It's an offering far different from the first space tourists, who paid tens of millions of dollars to travel to the International Space Station (ISS) in the 2000s.

Having paid for a much cheaper ticket—costing $250,000 with Virgin, as yet unknown with Blue Origin—the new round of space tourists will be propelled dozens of miles into the atmosphere, before coming back down to Earth. By comparison, the ISS is in orbit 250 miles (400 kilometers) from our planet.

The goal is to approach or pass through the imaginary line marking where space begins—either the Karman line, at 100 kilometers or 62 miles, or the 50-mile boundary recognized by the US Air Force.

Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity will be attached to a carrier spacecraft, from which it will then detach at around 49,000 feet (15,000 meters)

At this altitude, the sky looks dark and the curvature of the earth can be seen clearly.

Virgin Galactic

With Virgin Galactic, six passengers and two pilots are boarded onto SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity, which resembles a private jet.

The VSS Unity will be attached to a carrier spacecraft—the WhiteKnightTwo—from which it will then detach at around 49,000 feet (15,000 meters.) Once released, the spaceship will fire up its rocket, and head for the sky.

Then, the passengers will float in zero-gravity for several minutes, before coming back to Earth.

The descent is slowed down by a "feathering" system that sees the spacecraft's tail pivot, as if arching, before returning to normal and gliding to land at Virgin's "spaceport" in the New Mexico desert.

Blue Origin has developed a system similar to a traditional rocket: the New Shepard, named after astronaut Alan Shepard.

In total, the mission lasts between 90 minutes and two hours. During a May 29 test in California's Mojave desert, the spaceship reached an altitude of 21 miles, heading for space.

In October 2014, the Virgin spaceship broke down in flight due to a piloting error, killing one of two pilots on board. The tests later resumed with a new craft.

The company has now also reached a deal to open a second "spaceport" at Italy's Taranto-Grottaglie airport, in the south of the country.

Branson in May told BBC Radio 4 that he hoped to himself be one of the first passengers in the next 12 months. About 650 people make up the rest of the waiting list, Virgin told AFP.

Blue Origin

Blue Origin, meanwhile, has developed a system closer to the traditional rocket: the New Shepard.

Six passengers will take their place in a "capsule" fixed to the top of Blue Origin's 60-foot-long rocket

On this journey, six passengers take their place in a "capsule" fixed to the top of a 60-foot-long rocket. After launching, it detaches and continues its trajectory several miles toward the sky. During an April 29 test, the capsule made it 66 miles.

After a few minutes of weightlessness, during which passengers can take in the view through large windows, the capsule gradually falls back to earth with three large parachutes and retrorockets used to slow the spacecraft.

From take-off to landing, the flight took 10 minutes during the latest test.

Until now, tests have only been carried out using dummies at Blue Origin's West Texas site.

But one of its directors, Rob Meyerson, said in June the first human tests would come "soon."

Meanwhile, another company official, Yu Matsutomi, said during a conference Wednesday that the first tests with passengers would take place "at the end of this year," according to Space News.

SpaceX's Dragon capsule, seen here in a cargo configuration, during a NASA mission to the International Space Station in July 2018

What's next?

SpaceX and Boeing are developing their own capsules to transport NASA astronauts, most likely in 2020, after delays—a significant investment that the companies will likely make up for by offering private passenger flights.

"If you're looking to go to space, you'll have quadruple the menu of options that you ever had before," Phil Larson, assistant dean at the University of Colorado, Boulder's College of Engineering and Applied Science, told AFP.

Hotels in Space

Longer term, the Russian firm that manufactures Soyuz rockets is studying the possibility of taking tourists back to the ISS. And a US start-up called Orion Span announced earlier this year it hopes to place a luxury space hotel into orbit within a few years—but the project is still in its early stages.

Aurora Station. Houston-based company Orion Span, Inc. just announced plans to open the planet’s first space hotel, with plenty of parking for flying roadsters.

Veteran technology executive and serial entrepreneur Frank Bunger is CEO & Founder at Orion Span. He has extensive experience building early stage company team, product and go to market, from zero to eight digit revenue. Frank has a multi-disciplinary background across several industries, including software, hardware and manufacturing. Most recently, he was Vice President at UpGuard, a firm focused on software automation, where his division performed in the top 3% of SaaS groups - worldwide - by sales and retention. An ardent renaissance man, he has additionally worked in an award-winning capacity in a variety of roles ranging from engineer, sales, solutions design, solutions delivery, to executive management.

Frank holds a MBA from the University of California Haas School of Business. In his free time, Frank likes to go sailing or hiking with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Orion Span is beating the eventual rush to provide space tourists with a place to lay their weary heads, as Bloomberg first reported. The luxury space hotel would orbit 200 miles above Earth, offering six guests 384 sunrises and sunsets as they race around the planet for 12 days at incredibly high speeds. It’s the perfect option (well, the only option) for those well-heeled Virgin Galactic travelers willing and able to spend $250,000 on a ticket to the stars.

The company hopes to launch the modular station in late 2021 and welcome its first guests the following year. The once-in-a-lifetime astronaut experience would last 12 days with a price tag that starts at $9.5 million per person. Deposits are already being accepted for stays on Aurora Station for a mere $80,000 per person. Make your reservation here. Don’t worry, the deposits are refundable if, say, the technology to shuttle tourists aboard the platform doesn’t exist by the time of your reservation.

Since its founding in 1999, Bigelow Aerospace has focused on building inflatable space modules that provide habitats in low-Earth orbit with more breathing room. Now, the Las Vegas-based space company has launched Bigelow Space Operations (BSO), a spinoff venture dedicated to marketing and operating these inflatable space habitats, which could be used as space hotels.

Founder, Robert Bigelow is an experienced general contractor, designer, developer, financier, buyer and manager of many large real estate projects in the US. Mr. Bigelow holds the exclusive licensing rights to commercialize expandable habitat technology originally conceived but abandoned by NASA in the 1990’s. Over the last seventeen years, Mr. Bigelow has earned over twenty patents, launched three prototype spacecraft, partnered with NASA on several contracts, built the necessary facilities to design and fabricate expandable habitat technology, and has advocated for a sustainable commercial space economy.

According to a BSO press release, the company’s first objective is to quantify the market for orbiting stations. They will spend millions of dollars in 2018 alone to detail the opportunities available on the global, national, and corporate level.

BSO will also market and operate the two B330 inflatable space habitats Bigelow plans to launch by 2021. Both the B330-1 and the B330-2 are designed for low-Earth orbit, and each is capable of housing up to six people inside its 330 cubic meters (nearly 12,000 cubic feet) of expandable space.

Each of the B330 habits is nearly one-third of the volume of the International Space Station (ISS), and as Blaire Bigelow, VP for corporate strategy at Bigelow Aerospace, told The Verge, the company wants to make them available as “on orbit space for science and research at much a lower price than ISS.” Bigelow believes this accessibility to low-Earth orbit could help foreign nations jumpstart their own space programs.

In 2016, NASA attached another of Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable space modules, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), to the ISS, and in 2017, the space agency decided to extended the BEAM contract for an additional three years. The partnership between Bigelow and NASA shouldn’t come as a surprise since the company’s founder, Robert Bigelow, first got the idea of an inflatable habitat from NASA’s own TransHAB project back in 1999.

Like other luxury hotels looking for multiple revenue streams, both companies have bigger plans other than just being the planet’s first space hotel, though. They want to offer charters to space agencies, hope to support zero gravity research, and serve as a base for space manufacturing. Don’t put the deposit on that retirement condo in Panama quite yet, because they are also hoping to sell the world’s first space condominiums.

Fabrizio Poli is an independent aviation consultant specialized in aircraft sales. He is also an accomplished Airline Transport Pilot having flown both private Jets and for the airlines. Fabrizio is also a bestselling author and inspirational speaker & has been featured on Russia Today (RT), TRT World, Social Media Examiner, Bloomberg, Channel 5, Chicago Tribune, Daily Telegraph, City Wealth Magazine, Billionaire.com, Wealth X, Financial Times, El Financiero and many other Media offering insight on the aviation world. Fabrizio is also regularly featured as an Aviation Analyst on Russia Today (RT) and TRT World. Fabrizio is also aviation special correspondent Most Magazine. Fabrizio is also considered one of the world's top 30 experts in using Linkedin for business. You can tune in weekly to Fabrizio's business Podcast Living Outside the Cube available both in video & audio. You can also follow Fabrizio's aviation videos on Biz Jet TV  Fabrizio's latest book "Health4Flyers", the first natural-health book for and frequent flyers is now available worldwide.