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Push to send tourists to space soon
Space tourism could be right around the corner. Two companies in the aerospace industry are teaming up to make it a reality sooner than later.
MELBOURNE, Fla. - Space tourism probably isn’t for everybody, but everyone we interviewed for this story wants to go. You’ll need between $10-20 million and a strong stomach to do like the astronauts do.
SpaceX and Space Adventures, Inc. have partnered for a new deal to take four people into space in late 2021. The brave souls will strap into a Dragon Crew Capsule, and for five days, they’ll tool around above earth. Mind you, the spacecraft is rather small -- 13 feet across -- but the views will be out of this world.
Richard Garriott has gone. Often referred to as the first space tourist ever. In 2008, the video game developer went to the International Space Station as a private astronaut. And now he’s on the board of Space Adventures Incorporated. As a boy, Garriott’s dad worked for NASA.
"When I was about 13 years old, a NASA doctor told me, because I needed glasses, I can’t go. I'm no longer eligible to be an astronaut. I was crushed. I was kicked out of the club. That's what it felt like. I resolved myself quickly, if I couldn’t go by that doctor's rules, I’ll make my own rules, I’ll open up commercial space so I could go." Garriott said.
And this is interesting, Garriott knows who else wants to go.
"I would say half of the people on the list, six active people talking about going, are known names," Garriott said.
The 2021 trip will let space tourists have about the same vantage point- as the Gemini astronauts did in 1966.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talks about the need to take human life off the earth for our survival. Musk says we need to be a multi-planetary species.
And SpaceX says this tourism trip will "forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it."