2024 The first space tourist trips begin
Febbraio 12, 2024
It is no longer just a dream to fly into space, to be a tourist in the galaxy and see with your own eyes what until now only imagination and cinema have allowed us to see. From today your dream can come true.
The Axiom company plans to carry out several test missions from 2024 to bring its astronauts to the ISS, the international space station, the only one currently in orbit. However, each time some private passengers will also travel with them for a short stay in space: each of whom has paid a ‘ticket’ costing several tens of millions of dollars.
Several private aerospace companies have emerged in recent years, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
The intention of these companies is to build a private space station to be used as a base for space tourism. So far the investment by Orbital Reef and Axiom Space with the involvement of NASA has been around almost half a billion dollars without counting that of private companies SpaceX, Virgin Galatic and Blue Origin.
The new space station will be called Starlab.
How much does a space flight cost?
Space travel, just like the first commercial air travel, will probably initially remain an exclusive for a select few given the excessive cost of tickets, but as the years go by it will increasingly be within everyone’s reach. The average cost of tickets for a space trip today is between 500,000 and 4 million dollars.
But how much does a space flight pollute?
A first estimate of the environmental impact of tourist flights in space has been calculated: a flight in space emits 100 times more CO2 into the atmosphere than a normal airline flight. But at the moment scientists do not have sufficient data and dedicated computing capacity to establish how great the real damage caused by space tourism to the climate and the environment will be.
