The Uber-optimistic History And Prolonged Future Of Space Tourism

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Tired of the same old vacation getaway? Looking for something out of this world? Book a weekend stay at a LEO Island resort. All our Low Earth Orbit hotels are a mere 100 miles from any shuttle station on Earth. Or climb aboard an orbital cruise—our latest line of LEO space yachts offer private suites with sweeping views, nightly concerts, artificial-gravity swimming pools , saunas, and weightless sports. If only it were true.

For the average Earthling, touring space may still be the stuff of science fiction, but in 2000, Popular Science published a story by contributing writer Dan Cray, predicting that such luxury vacations might be available as soon as 2007. A lot of things had to go right to get space tourism off the ground, especially in such a short timeframe. Nearly a quarter of a century later, we've made some progress, but 2007 was uber-optimistic even for the uber-wealthy.

In 2001, several months after Cray's Popular Science article, US venture capitalist Dennis Tito , who worked for NASA early in his career, would become the second civilian to escape Earth's tug, and the first American space tourist . The price tag: $20 million.

If Akiyama's week-long beat as a cosmonaut ignited the fuse for space tourism by demonstrating civilians could travel to space, it was the anticipation of Tito's trip that gave it oxygen a decade later. "Space enthusiasts say the resulting publicity promises to spark the interest of investment capitalists," Cray wrote, referring to Tito's upcoming space odyssey. At the time, more than half a dozen space tourism companies and organizations, which had sprung up in the 1990s, were already forecasting rosy business trajectories in the coming decade despite no track record of delivering anything or anyone to space.

Some space tourism enthusiasts, like Buzz Aldrin—the celebrated American astronaut who followed Neil Armstrong onto the Moon's surface in July 1969—focused their efforts on developing affordable means to get to space. Aldrin founded ShareSpace in 1998 to promote space tourism as something for everyone, not just the ultrarich. He also founded Starcraft Boosters in 1996 to design reusable booster rockets, developing rudimentary hardware for NASA.

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