Space Travel Firms Seek Tourists/New Vehicles for U.S. Astronauts

SpaceX hopes to send two tourists around the moon and back in the relatively near future; but bold visions for the future are standard for SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who also founded Tesla Motors. Sierra Nevada Corp. (www.sncorp.com) has designed a winged vehicle called the Dream Chaser that will also fly on an Atlas 5 rocket. The craft would launch vertically, but land horizontally on conventional runways, much like the Space Shuttle. NASA selected the Dream Chaser to provide cargo delivery, return and disposal service for the ISS, with a minimum of six missions.

Virgin Galactic (which is owned by Sir Richard Branson 's UK-based Virgin Group and UAE-based Aabar Investments PJS) is one of the world's first commercial space passenger lines. Its VSS Unity (formerly referred to as SpaceShipTwo) spacecraft and a related launch vehicle were developed by Mojave-based Scaled Composites, which was founded by famed aircraft innovator Burt Rutan. On July 12, 2021, Branson, along with two pilots and three Virgin Galactic employees, successfully traveled on SpaceShipTwo, where they enjoyed a few minutes of weightlessness before flying back to Earth and executing a runway landing. The company completed its first commercial space flight in June 2023, and subsequently announced that it was beginning monthly flights. Virgin Galactic has a backlog of reservations for future flights at $450,000 each. Prior to flight, passengers go through a two or three-day training program. The weightless part of their flight experience lasts about six minutes.

Blue Origin, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2000, offers flights that take roughly 11-minutes in total, in fully automated reusable capsules, with views of the Earth from the edge of space. After initial capsules enjoyed 15 successful, unoccupied test flights, Bezos himself blasted into high altitude on July 20, 2021, accompanied by his brother. Also on the flight were an 82-year-old aviation pioneer who was one of 13 female pilots who trained at NASA in the early 1960s, plus an 18-year-old from The Netherlands. The 10-minute flight reached an altitude of about 66 miles above the Earth. Multiple flights in its New Shepherd suborbital vehicle, will be available at a fee of about $1 million per passenger. As of late 2023, the New Shepard was still grounded after an unmanned flight was aborted one minute after liftoff on a flight in 2022, resulting in a full technical review of the New Shepard.

SPOTLIGHT: World View Enterprises, Inc.

World View Enterprises, Inc., headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, is a high-altitude balloon company that conducts near-space exploration. As a full-service commercial launch provider, the firm’s technology offers its potential clients a cheaper and more precise alternative to using traditional methodologies, such as drones and satellites, for a broad range of commercial needs and applications. World View’s navigable and persistent stratospheric flight vehicles are high-altitude balloons called Stratollites. Stratollites are solar powered, remotely operated, navigable vehicles that can haul a payload ranging from 100 to 20,000 pounds up to 19 miles into the stratosphere and remain there, virtually stationary, for months. The craft’s ability to navigate the crisscross wind patterns of the stratosphere in a consistent figure-eight pattern opens the Stratollite to a myriad of applications such as providing communication services to remote areas and as an affordable research platform for predicting weather patterns and studying astro and solar physics. In addition to the Stratollite, World View also offers space tourism opportunities in its World View Explorer capsule with a capacity of up to eight passengers and two crew members. The $50,000 flights are from five to eight hours and reach an altitude of about 100,000 feet for views of the Earth previously reserved solely for astronauts. The Explorer capsule has fully reclining seats, a lavatory, oversized windows, inflight dining and bar service, cameras, telescopes and individual viewing screens. World View has seven space ports for viewing the Grand Canyon in the U.S., the Amazon in Brazil, Aurora Borealis in Norway, Giza Pyramids in Egypt, the Serengeti in Kenya and the Great Wall of China in Mongolia.

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