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I searched for "book trip" and found lots of Mars references but nothing specific to ISS or LEO
The article at the link below describes a proposal to offer space trips to the ISS (for now) for $55 MM.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/now-boo … 51953.html
This topic is offered as a connection point for future updates on commercial space travel offerings to Low Earth Orbit
There should be a slowly increasing number of such offerings in the years ahead.
You Can Now Book an All-Inclusive 10-Day Trip to the International Space Station for $55 Million
Bryan Hood
(th)
Last edited by tahanson43206 (2020-03-07 06:18:17)
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"Space tourism" started with Tito's trip to the ISS onboard a Soyuz ship and was followed by others as a "booked trip" as provided through "Space Adventures". Some would go as to say that Sub Orbital is also part of that flights by the rich.
Space should not be for the rich but for even for the hard worker, brillant, creative and many more category of people that want to go. Sure some day we will travel to places beyond earth as we do for flights onboard an airplane.
What is not said is the level of training required for each individual as well as medical checks so as to allow you onboard any destination.
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Consider: airline tickets are in the $1-10/lb ($2-20/kg) class today, depending on where you go. Many but not all people can afford to fly at that price. Using Falcon-9 as an example, flown non-reusably per Spacex's website: 20 metric tons to LEO for $63M per launch. That's about $3M/m.ton or $3000/kg to LEO. Or about $1500/lb.
THAT is why space tourism is still only for the filthy rich. There's still a long way to go, even though Spacex's current price is an order of magnitude cheaper than NASA's (~$20M/ton = 20,000/kg = $40,000/lb).
The only real question is how much less $/kg or $/lb will the LEO price be with Starship/Super Heavy? My best guess (and guess it is, NO ONE knows yet) is around $0.5-1M/ton = $500-1000/kg = $1000-2000/lb.
I don't really think this is the iteration that will make mass space tourism possible. Although upper middle class people might be able to swing a ticket to LEO once in a lifetime. About like buying a house.
The ticket to the moon or Mars will be about 7 times higher, because you have to launch 6 tankers to send one Starship outside LEO. Unless it takes more. That means only the rich will be able to go there.
Clearly, there is a long way to go, way past Starship/Super Heavy, if ever spaceflight is to be affordable to the masses.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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GW,
So even at $1,000 per pound, going into space just once is still like buying a house. Imagine for a moment how an electromagnetic catapult assisted launch that entirely eliminates the boosters might affect launch costs. If you can throw away the booster and all the fuel it consumes for, say, a thousand dollars worth of electricity per flight, then space flight might be a bit more like buying a trip on the Concorde, meaning similar to the price of a subcompact car. That's still nothing like purchasing an airline ticket, but there are a heck of a lot more people who could afford to do that at least once in their lifetimes. I already know that I can't afford to go into space, but maybe I can make it so cheap in 10 to 20 years that my children can do it and for their children it will simply be a routine part of life. Beyond that, I want to make launch costs so cheap that our government or large corporations can afford to build real Starships at least as big as an aircraft carrier. They won't start as anything so grand as the ones from Star Trek, but that's the size of ship required for reliable and routine interplanetary travel.
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