The space race for tourists

After years of delays, the long-awaited dream of commercial flights to space may soon become reality

Guests staying in a pod of Russia's planned space hotel would eat dehydrated food — while orbiting at an average speed of 18,600 mph.
(Image credit: Orbital Technologies)

Who first proposed space tourism?

Pan Am optimistically started offering commercial passenger flights to the moon in 1968 — the morning after Apollo 8 became the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon. Juan Trippe, the airline's founder, established a "First Moon Flights Club," whose members could reserve seats onboard a commercial moon shuttle that he predicted would launch in the year 2000 at a cost of $14,000 a head. Among the 93,000 people to sign up was then California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Trippe's timing, at least, wasn't too far off the mark. In April 2001, American businessman Dennis Tito became the first space tourist when he paid $20 million to fly to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Now, it finally looks as if larger-scale passenger flights into space will soon become a reality. The private company SpaceX last month sent the first commercial shuttle into orbit to rendezvous with the ISS — the most significant step yet in the private sector's race to the stars.

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