Space tourism, as the name suggests, is the travelling of human to space for tourism purposes. Space tourism includes various types such as suborbital, orbital and lunar space tourism. The Russian space agency has already organised an orbital tour and working on making vehicles for a suborbital tour.
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Some major commercial space tourism companies
Virgin Galactic
It is the subsidiary of Virgin Group, which is headquartered in London. The Virgin Galactic aims towards the suborbital commercial space flights. It has also made its testing flight using VSS Unity in December 2018. The test flight brought the possibility of commercial space tourism more closely.
There is already a waiting list of people with the company ready to take space tour, for which the initial deposit fee, to confirm the name in the waiting list, is £200,000. There are also some issues with the company’s space tour, such as multiple delays, but it is working on removing the issues.
SpaceX
It is a private aerospace company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 and now headquartered in Hawthorne, California. The main purpose behind the Elon Musk Company is the cost reduction of space tours, and also the colonization of Mars. SpaceX is prioritizing lunar tourism which is quite ignored by other space companies.
In 2017 Elon Musk announced to send two customers on first lunar tourism mission around the moon. The plan was to send them in 2018, but it has been delayed. The company did not reveal any price or waiting list yet.
Blue Origin
It is also a private company from America, which is headquartered in Kent, Washington. It also performs sub-orbital space tours, which makes the company a big rival for Virgin Galactic. It offers the space tours in the New Shepard rocket, which is known as a more traditional rocket. The New Shepard lands and takes off vertically.
Like its competitor, Virgin Galactic, company has also performed various space test flights and planning to send its customers to space tours soon. But unlike its competitor, the company did not have any shortlist of customers nor did it announce any price tag for tickets or short listings. It has plans to send six passengers on each flight.