When will space tourism take off?

[fafalone]

Within what time period do you anticipate the beginning of space tourism, i.e. easy access to at least the established boundary of space on a large scale?

[aommaster]

Do you mean trips to the moon and mars? Or total tourism, like building things on the moon?

[jordan]

AOM, I believe he just means into space in general. The guy who made it 62 miles up was in space and I think that's what Fafalone is talking about when he said the "established boundry of space". Just a short trip up and back.

 

I would guess by large scale you mean maybe 20% of the world's population has access? In that case I'd go with 50-100 years.

[aommaster]

I would go with 26-50 years. People have already made bookings to go to the moon! It costs about $750,000 to take a trip to the moon. This signifies that going there would come in quite a short amount of time!

[senexa]

Have a little faith, you guys. I remember when Kennedy said we would be on the moon in ten years, and we did it. With the backing the private spaceship has and the interest of a lot of monied people, it is almost probable that tourism to space will be available in five years or less. The profits are too big for it not to happen.

[J'Dona]

In all honesty jordan, I don't think that large scale is as much as 20%, considering that only 12.2% of the world's population has internet access (unless you're talking about the developed world only, in which case nevermind). But obviously space tourism would be a bit more expensive than internet, so maybe that's not a valid comparison.

 

I personally put 11-25 years though I was close on 26-50 years, because now that the private sector has gotten involved, and given the massive demand ro at least desire to go into space, I wouldn't be surprised if the business opens up sooner. If they can produce space planes - that is, aircraft that can reach the top of the atmosphere on conventional engines and then switch to rockets - they can slash fuel costs by 90%. Most people just want to go into space and go around in zero-g and see the Earth from above rather than go to any particular place.

[jordan]

Yep. I did mean the developed world. Sorry about that. But to think how many of this ships would have to by built (which implies major funding) to be able to give 20% of the population a reasonable shot at it is pretty big. Right now, we have one that can take civilians into space. It holds two passangers. At the high cost and low number of people it can take, it isn't for very many people. We would need to build many, many more before most people have a reasonable shot at getting into space. This will take time.

[Dave]

I reckon it'll be available in the next 10 years, but it's gonna be way too expensive for your average Joe Bloggs to go into space. And not everyone is going to be going on a replica of SpaceShipOne. There's plenty of other ideas (like the space-plane) for a re-usable method of going into space. Plus, there's the added bonus that it takes a very short amount of time to get from, say, the UK to Australia. If you go by plane, it takes about 24 hours. On a commercial space plane, it'd take considerably less time.

[Sayonara]

I'd hope 20% of the developed world doesn't go on space holidays, at least not until there is some kind of (actually effective) global initiative to get away from non-renewable energy.

 

Half the world lives in poverty, and the other half is already planning to waste fuel on the most pointless luxury mankind has ever conceived.

 

It's all very well to say "slash fuel costs by 90%", but what that actually means here is "we are doing it 90% less expensively than we otherwise might". It's still a vast amount of energy which is essentially being spent on nothing.

[Dave]

If it's used for the purpose of travel, then surely it's better to do it this way rather than waste 90% of the fuel you'd otherwise use though?

 

Having said that, I think it's only viable for long distance travel. You're obviously not going to use it for short hops around America or whatever.

[Sayonara]

I thought the topic was space tourism, but I see that it has subtley changed to "space planes", which is a different thing.

 

You can tell what my post was about because of the first line, which tells you what it's about

[Dave]

Fair enough

 

It is a good point to be honest. I have never seen the point in just firing yourself into space for maybe a couple of minutes and, as you say, wasting a lot of precious resources in the process - as well as having to pay a hefty price for it.

 

Maybe they should pump some of that money into solving some useful problems.

[YT2095]

I thought it had already started some years ago?

didn`t some guy pay the Russians a few Million to go up into space with them, just for the fun of it?

[jordan]

Perhaps, but we're looking for easy-access, large scale space tourism. The stuff that the average person could obtain.

[Dave]

It's not really tourism either; not exactly your average holiday

[J'Dona]

That's true Sayonara... it would be crazy to try and establish a space tourism industry without securing another, renewable fuel source. Technically it could be done by using hydrogen fuel rockets (just like they do now on rockets) where the hydrogen was collected from water via electrolysis, using renewable electricity sources to do that. But since that would require a bleep load of energy, probably the only way to produce enough without using fossil fuel powr stations would be fusion plants, which incidentally would only be really viable if we could get to hydrogen isotope cources like the Moon for our juice, which needs spacecraft (though the initial energy requirement is negligable of course).

 

But then putting fusion power plants into the equatoin just inflates the time scale needed before space tourism takes off, doesn't it?

 

True, space tourism is a pointless luxury of the developed world... though not if it leads to the colonisation of the moon, or hyper-slashes the costs of satellites, telescopes and stations, or revolutionises long-range transport, or reduces pollution by reducing the use of petroleum fuelled aircraft, or provides a boost to the aerospace industry roughly as big as the internet did to the computer industry. Plus it's cool!

[Dave]

I think before space tourism was going to take off, we'd need some kind of space elevator a la 3001. That way it makes it easy to get into space and fly to various places, although I don't know the technicalities involved in this; I daresay they're rather large.

[Sayonara]

Somewhere in this discussion is a link to a very detailed discussion of space elevators.

[admiral_ju00]

Yeah, but isn't the cabling they think will need is only micrometers long or something?

[Sayonara]

The cabling will have to withstand radiation, high temperatures, acid vapours in the atmosphere, and possible impacts with micrometeors, debris or even orbital devices like satellites. And of course the mechanical stresses of remaining in place and carrying the cars themselves.

[Dave]

Yes, I can just imagine them building this huge elevator, and then one of the military's spy satellites colliding with it and falling over.

[Sayonara]

I think the satellite would be a lot worse off

[Dave]

True, but it does have this immense comedy value about it. Everyone's cheering, we can all get into space... *crunch*

 

Guess that's a no-no then

[YT2095]

IIRC, the elevator design was based arounf carbon fiber nano tubes or something like that, I distinctly remember comenting on how it would make the worlds largest Lightening conductor as many fishermen are killed yearly using carbon fiber poles and inadvertantly touch an overhead power line

IIRC too, there was also a comment about it being a prime target for terrorists (not sure who made that comment though?).

[Sayonara]

I don't think lightning would be a big problem tbh.

 

Certainly not compared to terrorist threats (although the Channel Tunnel was derided as the world's biggest target before it was opened, and it has never been attacked.)