Space tourism is the recent phenomenon of tourists paying for flights into space pioneered by Russia. As of 2009, orbital space tourism opportunities are limited and expensive, with only the Russian Space Agency providing transport. The price for a flight brokered by Space Adventures to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft is $20–35 million.
Infrastructure for a suborbital space tourism industry is being developed through the construction of spaceports in numerous locations, including California, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Florida, Virginia, Alaska, Wisconsin, Esrange in Sweden as well as the United Arab Emirates. Some use the term "personal spaceflight" as in the case of the Personal Spaceflight Federation.
A number of startup companies have sprung up in recent years, hoping to create a space tourism industry. For a list of such companies, and the spacecraft they are currently building, see list of space tourism companies.
After early successes in space, much of the public saw intensive space exploration as inevitable. Those aspirations are remembered in science fiction such as Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust and also 2001: A Space Odyssey, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Joanna Russ's 1968 novel Picnic on Paradise, and Larry Niven's Known Space stories. Lucian in 2 A.D. in his book True History examines the idea of a crew of men whose ship travels to the Moon during a storm. Jules Verne also took up the theme of lunar visits in his books, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Robert A. Heinlein’s short story The Menace from Earth, published in 1957, was one of the first to incorporate elements of a developed space tourism industry within its framework. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was common belief that space hotels would be launched by 2000. Many futurologists around the middle of the 20th century speculated that the average family of the early 21st century would be able to enjoy a holiday on the Moon.
The end of the Space Race, however, signified by the Moon landing, decreased the emphasis placed on space exploration by national governments and therefore led to decreased demands for public funding of manned space flights.
At the end of the 1990s, MirCorp, a private venture by then in charge of the space
station, began seeking potential touronauts to visit Mir in order to offset some
of its maintenance costs. Dennis Tito, an American businessman and former JPL scientist,
became their first candidate. When the decision to de-
In conjunction with the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation and Rocket
and Space Corporation Energia, Space Adventures facilitated the flights for the world's
first private space explorers: Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Gregory Olsen, Anousheh
Ansari and Charles Simonyi. The first three touronauts paid in excess of $20 million
(USD) each for their 10-
On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito became the first "fee-
After the Columbia disaster, space tourism on the Russian Soyuz program was temporarily
put on hold, because Soyuz vehicles became the only available transport to the ISS.
However, in 2006, space tourism was resumed. On September 18, 2006, Anousheh Ansari,
an Iranian American (Soyuz TMA-
In 2003, NASA and the Russian Space Agency agreed to use the term 'Spaceflight Participant'
to distinguish those space travelers from astronauts on missions coordinated by those
two agencies. Tito, Shuttleworth, Olsen, Ansari, and Simonyi were designated as such
during their respective space flights. NASA also lists Christa McAuliffe as a "Space
Flight Participant" (although she did not pay a fee), apparently due to her non-
The Soviet space program was aggressive in broadening the pool of cosmonauts. The
Soviet Inter-
The U.S. space shuttle program included payload specialist positions which were usually
filled by representatives of companies or institutions managing a specific payload
on that mission. These payload specialists did not receive the same training as professional
NASA astronauts and were not employed by NASA, so they were essentially private astronauts.
NASA was also eager to prove its capability to Congressional sponsors, and Senator
Jake Garn and (then-
With the realities of the post-
In 1991, British chemist Helen Sharman was selected from a pool of public applicants to be the first Briton in space. As the United Kingdom had no human space program, the arrangement was by a consortium of private companies who contracted with the Russian space program. Sharman was also in a sense a touronaut, but she was a working cosmonaut with a full training regimen.
