Space Tourism – A New Market Is Emerging In Space | The Budapest Business Journal on the web

Many people have dreamed of eating and drinking floating in microgravity, like real astronauts. This dream will soon become a reality, while some companies are pioneers in the ambitious goal of making space travel accessible to all. This new market is called space tourism.

Dr. István Sárhegyi, Junior Associate, Sárhegyi and Associates Law Firm

It is likely that many people have heard of Elk Musk's SpaceX, but how many have heard of other aerospace companies such as Blue Origin, which belongs to the richest man in the world. Bezos, or Virgin Galactic by Sir Richard Branson? These companies are the tools by which the multimillionaire businessmen mentioned above hope to establish space tourism.

We have already seen some tourists in the space. For example, the American businessman of Hungarian origin, Charles Simonyi, has already made two trips to the International Space Station. Simonyi is considered a space tourist rather than an astronaut, because he has paid a lot of money to book a trip to the ISS. Until now, this has distinguished astronauts from tourists.

However, the main goal of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson is to make space tourism accessible to the general public. They have both promised to lower the price of space travel to $ 250,000 by 2020. But they are also aiming to further reduce that number, and the end goal is set to increase. to reach $ 50,000. This means that anyone who can afford to pay $ 50,000 and who has good physical and mental health could become a tourist of space.

Space tourism focuses primarily on the feeling of being in space. For this reason, the first trips will only last a few minutes, hours maximum, enough for space tourists to perceive the feeling of being in a microgravity environment and then return home. During this short period, they can discover what it is like to be an astronaut at the International Space Station.

Of course, the owners of these aerospace companies have long-term visions of how space tourism could develop. Blue Origin, for example, says that it plans to organize trips for tourists from the space around the moon, as even to establish a lunar base to start building a human settlement on the Moon.

The emergence of the entire space tourism market is the result of an international trend known as New Space. At the heart of New Space is the global emergence of the private spaceflight industry. These new members of the space industry have strengthened and gained the right to be part of the market, as well as national space agencies (NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, etc.).

For the moment, it seems that New Space has sparked cooperation between national and private space companies. However, it is more likely that private companies are willing to overload their domestic competitors, and space tourism could certainly be a solution for this, so we are watching developments in this sector with great interest.