|
|
Back to the speakers' list
Back to the program
Space – The New Frontier of Tourism Mr. Jason KLASSI - Space Traveler Inc. Space Tourism Society, Los Angeles, California, Etats-Unis
Introduction
On April 28th, 2001 the first space tourist Dennis Tito left Earth on his historical 8-day vacation in space. Floating weightless above Earth he exclaimed. “I love space!” A year later South African Mark Shuttleworth became Space Tourist #2. Next year the world will watch as 2 more space tourists travel together – at the same time. Would you like to be the first husband and wife, the first father and son, the first mother and daughter, floating weightless in space and taking pictures of each other with Earth in the background?
As we approach the 100th anniversary of powered flight on December 17th, a sustainable space tourism industry is poised for lift-off. The imminent launch of affordable, suborbital flights will make space tourism available to thousands and then millions of people. Just as the European Space Agency views “space as a new frontier for an expanding Union"1 , space tourism is the new and unlimited frontier for the tourism industry.
Sustainable Space Tourism is the Catalyst for a Grander Space Travel Infrastructure
A sustainable space tourism industry is the driving force behind a larger space travel infrastructure and ultimately our ability to sustain life off Earth in the frontier of space. Someday, the Earth will not be able to sustain life. Before then, humanity must move off planet or become extinct. By creating a sustainable space tourism industry, tourism professionals play a crucial role in sustaining humanity.
This prestigious 5th Summit for Tourism is dedicated to sustainable tourism and the last remaining wide-open spaces. Outer space is such a frontier. Space tourism is the sustainable way to develop it.
People are willing to pay a lot of money to float weightless, look back Earth and marvel at our precious planet’s sustainability. Just as travel makes us aware of Earth’s unique biomes like Antarctica, the Great Barrier Reef and even Mont-Blanc, space travel makes us aware of the delicate balance of our planet as a whole. Spaceship Earth is a sustainable biosphere spinning through space giving people what they need to live - air, water, food, music, love, vacations, etc.
Finally, after 100 years of flight, space tourism can learn from air travel that the only road to sustainability is to supply services that the public wants to buy. People want space tourism. A United Nations mandate states that travel is an inherent human right. So is space travel.
Space tourism is a catalyst to space development. Apollo 11 moon walker Buzz Aldrin said that large-scale space tourism needs to be seen as a catalyst to create a much grander space infrastructure. Not only would tens of millions of U.S. citizens be able to travel in space, but the hardware necessary for returning to the moon and exploring Mars can also be realized2.
Millions of People Want to Space Travel
People love space! Market surveys indicate that large numbers of people from all over the world want to go to space. A CNN pole taken the day after Tito’s flight asked the public: “Do you want to take a vacation to space?” 86% said, “Yes”! Whether we call ourselves space tourists, space travelers, astronauts or cosmonauts – space travel is all about the human experience in space. After twenty years in this field, I believe that the heart of the space tourism experience is:
- Floating weightless: Feeling the physical sensation of flying free in zero gravity.
- Viewing Earth from space: Gaining a new perspective on our world and ourselves
The first time mankind truly saw the Earth as a living biosphere was in 1968 when astronauts half-way to the Moon took pictures of their home. That powerful image of a fragile, blue planet in the blackness of space changed the way we perceived Earth – and ourselves. At first we may focus on finding our home city and country, but soon we’ll discover Earth as a totality without national borders. The more space tourists that return with this perception could have profound social consequences by lowering dangers of environmental pollution and war.
I know Dennis Tito. On the anniversary of his historic flight, he was the guest of honor at our Space Tourism Society Pioneer Awards in 2002. I remember him saying that he enjoyed most of his space vacation floating weightless, looking out the window at Earth, listening to opera on his Walkman and getting the best sleep of his life. I also know that looking at Earth from space brought him closer to his son Brad, an avid environmentalist.
Who can forget when Dennis floated from the tiny Soyuz capsule into the International Space Station for the first time and with a huge smile on his face? We, as human creatures, want to defy gravity and go beyond our limitations. We want to experience the joy and special individual freedom that comes with weightlessness. Space travel gives us the opportunity for personal and transpersonal growth and global understanding.
Where is Space Tourism Today?
Space tourism already exists. Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth are already official space tourists. What’s next?
First All-Tourist Space Flight Planned
The company that brokered missions for space tourists Tito and Shuttleworth has announced the first mission intended solely for tourists. SPACE ADVENTURES, the Russian Aviation & Space Agency, and RSC Energia, Russia’s leading aerospace company, will fly two privately-funded space travelers simultaneously to the international space station on a new Soyuz spacecraft offering two tourist seats in addition to the pilot seat. About a dozen people have applied for the two civilian seats on the proposed flight. It won’t be cheap — $20 million per seat and qualifying will not be simple.
Terrestrial Space Tourism
For most of us, space tourism is limited to adventures on the surface of the planet. In addition to the $20 million dollar flights aboard the Russian Soyuz, there are plenty of space tourism experiences close to home with a cost range of $1,000 - $98,000.
Over 10 million people each year visit a space museum, a rocket launch and space theme attractions like Disney’s Mission to Space. The terrestrial space tourism business is estimated at $1 billion dollars per year.
Terrestrial space tourism experiences can give you:
- Witness the thrilling launch of a Space Shuttle or Soyuz mission.
- Undergo space training in astronaut training facilities in Star City, Russia
- Dive in a deep-sea submersible to discover unique life forms on the bottom of the ocean
- Experience astronomy at a modern planetarium such as the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii or a total eclipse of the sun at an ancient Mayan observatory like Teotihuacán in Mexico.
- Fly to the edge of space in a supersonic jet.
High-Altitude Jets: Just above the planet, eager space tourists can get a glimpse of the curvature of Earth and the blackness of space by soaring to 85,000 feet or pulling 9-Gs in a variety of high-altitude supersonic jets.
Zero Gravity Flights: Today, you can experience zero gravity in specialized aircraft that fly parabolic flight patterns. Offering up to 20 seconds of weightlessness at a time, these parabolic flights have been used to train astronauts and make the actor Tom Hanks weightless in the movie Apollo 13.
Zero gravity or “parabolic flights” are currently the only method of creating weightlessness on Earth. Parabolic flights have been safely used for 30 years by NASA scientists to obtain useful intervals of zero gravity on Earth. These aircraft can carry about 25 passengers through a series of 40 parabolic flight patterns over a two-hour period. Each single parabola provides the passengers with about 30 seconds of weightlessness. Space Adventures offers zero-gravity flights today aboard the IL-76 Cosmonaut Trainer in Star City, Russia and the ZERO-G Corporation will begin offering this service in America next year. Even the public entity NASA will be contracting astronaut-training flights from the private Z-gravity Corp.
Sub-Orbital Space Tourism
The private, sub-orbital space program is taking off! A whole new generation of private space tourism entrepreneurs ranging from film director Steven Spielberg to Richard Branson of Virgin Airways and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com are hoping to launch the first privately funded, sub-orbital space craft. This historic flight will prove that we, the people, can reduce the cost of putting humans into orbit and make space accessible to almost anyone.
Participants in this new space race called the X-Prize will win a $10 million dollar award if they are the first private company to 62 miles, generally considered the edge of space, return them safely to Earth and then doing it again within 14 days. The craft will not go into orbit but will graze space, giving an orbit-like view of the Earth and perhaps 5 minutes of weightlessness.
The whole adventure would probably last about 15 minutes and cost $100,000. Hundreds of people have already paid cash deposits on sub-orbital flights with companies such as Scaled Composites, X-Corp and Armadillo Aerospace.
The technology developed for the X-prize competition – Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLV’s), Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO) configurations with new types of propulsion - will evolve into a variety of viable and economically sustainable space vehicles giving space tourism a terrific boost.
One of the leading contenders is Burt Rutans’ two-stage rocket ship. Burt gained notoriety as the designer of the Voyager aircraft that went around the world without stopping to refuel. His mother ship the White Knight and spacecraft called Spaceship One could launch in a few months.
By the way, with every purchase on my X-Prize Visa card, I earn extra frequent flyer ‘space travel miles’.
Is Space Tourism more than a small market niche?
There is a worldwide demand for space tourism. The major market surveys indicate that the demand for passenger space travel is hugely positive, across all categories: age, sex, income-level and country. A substantial majority of the general population, both men and women, wish they could travel to space: the youngest are the most keen, but many older people also say would like to go. Some 70% of those wishing to travel to space in Japan, North America and Germany say they would pay several months salary. A smaller percentage says they would pay even a year’s salary or more to go to space3.
Surveys suggest that about 10,000 Americans would spend up to $100,000 for a sub-orbital space adventure. The recent Futron/Zogby Survey into Public Space Travel4 forecasts a demand of 15,000 sub-orbital flights a year by 2020.
For orbital missions, the Futron survey took into account that the pool of people able to spend $12 - 20 million (the estimated cost of the Tito and Shuttleworth space flights onboard the Russian Soyuz) was rather small, yet still forecasted up to 60 travelers per year by 2020 assuming that a destination like the International Space Station (ISS) is available for the travelers5. When multiple space travelers can be accommodated on specialized spacecraft, then the unit price will come down and the demand will increase.
The Challenge to Space Tourism: The cost of getting to space must be reduced
The U.S. government's Space Shuttle costs approximately $100 million per passenger per flight. Fortunately, there are currently many private companies designing reusable passenger-carrying launch vehicles capable of repeated flights to and from low Earth orbit that are expected to cost around $10 billion.
In April 2001, despite NASA’s use of $1 trillion of taxpayers' money, the first private U.S. citizen to pay for a space flight, Dennis Tito, had to fly on the 1,657th Soyuz rocket, essentially the same vehicle that carried Yuri Gagarin 40 years earlier in 1961. Western space agencies have spent US$1 TRILLION since then without reducing the cost of getting to space by a single cent. Was this embarrassing fact one of the reasons why the heads of NASA and ESA made such public efforts to prevent Tito's flight? If that $1 trillion had been used as productively as the cumulative investment in the civil aviation industry launched by the Wright brothers, we would have a nearly $1 trillion/year space travel industry today6.
Designs of single-stage, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) rockets include Pacific American Launch Systems Phoenix, a passenger-carrying variant of the German Beta, and the Kankoh-Maru designed as part of the Japanese Rocket Society’s (JRS) space tourism research program started in 1993. Designs of two-stage horizontal take-off and landing (HTOL) vehicles include the Spacecab/Spacebus and precursor vehicles proposed by Bristol Spaceplanes Ltd, and a recent study done at Boeing. The estimated development costs in these studies range from a few billion dollars to about $16 billion7.
The Russian company NPO-Energia builds Soyuz crew vehicles for $12 million, Progress cargo craft for a little more than $6 million, and Soyuz launch vehicles for about $16 million. By contrast, NASA estimates the cost of developing a 4-to-6-person "orbital space plane" (OSP) to be launched on an existing expendable rocket by 2010 at $13 billion or more. Recent news states that NASA’s proposed Orbital Space Plane may actually be a non-reusable capsule. This brings space travel full circle. NASA is now proposing to use $13 billion of taxpayers’ money to redevelop an Apollo capsule 40 years after the original.
Solution: A Sustainable Private Space Tourism Industry
When the first privately-funded team flies to space and back, the historical impact should reverberate around the world perhaps even more than Tito's flight did. Why? Because the total development cost of Scaled Composites' vehicle, one of the leading contenders of the X-Prize, will have been what government space agencies spend every 12 hours. The cost per flight will be about 1/1,000 of the cost of Alan Shepard's first flight to space, a similar sub-orbital flight lasting just a few minutes. Coupled with the investigations in the United States as a result of NASA's loss of a second space shuttle, this should finally focus public attention on the fact that space agencies spend some US$30 billion of taxpayers' money every year yet generate almost nothing of economic value.
The public wants space tourism and space tourism is the only activity that offers to link the economic energy of consumer spending to space development. Just as air travel has created 50 million jobs worldwide, space travel can do the same and more.
How great is the potential for tourism in space?
The potential for space tourism is enormous. After all, Space is only 100 miles away.
How far will passenger space travel grow? Will it just remain the activity of a few rich individuals? Research gives us every reason to believe that it will grow like aviation. If just 10% of the rich countries' population were to take a single space flight at $20,000, this would represent a market of $2 trillion. More than 50% say they would like a flight; most say they would like to make several trips.
According to some studies, the estimated timetable to reach initial passenger service is about 10 years8 . In that case the transportation infrastructure in 2030 would be some $1 trillion dollars greater than continuing government space activities as they are today.
The pioneering work of the Japanese Rocket Society estimated that for an investment of some $12 billion it would be possible to carry passengers to orbit for about $25,000/passenger, starting in 10 years 8. This scenario was based upon building eight 50-passenger space vehicles per year. At this rate, passengers could grow by 100,000/year so that by 2020 there could be 1 million passengers/year. By 2030 we could expect to see 5 million passengers/year and the development of a range of more advanced services.
- With a scenario like this, some 40 million people would have visited space by 2030 - some 2% of the middle class of that time.
- The investment required to realize this scenario is far less than the $750 billion that taxpayers would pay through 2030 for space agency activities - yet the economic value of this scenario would be about $1 trillion higher.
- Some 20,000 people would be working in space - as hotel staff, which will be the largest employment in space for several decades 9. The range of on-orbit infrastructure would be determined primarily by the needs of the general public living in a zero gravity environment. This would have great economic value through the flowering of new business opportunities in every sector of economic activity.
Eventually, hotels could orbit Earth, spinning to create artificial gravity. We will catch daily scheduled flights to the moon on ferries that cycle between the two orbiting bodies. Companies like Hilton and Shimuzu Construction have been studying space hotels for decades. There are designs for orbiting cruise ships where guests engage in a variety of recreational activities including space sports, weightless dance, orbital acrobatics and some very unique private romantic encounters.
Envision the day when you book a flight to the moon and stay in a lunar hotel or take a longer expedition to the top of Mars’ Olympus Mons, a mountain three times as high as Mt. Everest. With our knowledge of sustainability derived from space travel, we can begin the “greening” of the solar system and gain greater respect for Earth as the garden oasis in space that it is. Because of space tourism, we could see the first children born of a second human race in orbital colonies on the Moon and Mars.
Are there related environmental protection problems?
As with most of our last remaining wide-open spaces, outer space suffers from too much junk left by visitors. The Apollo moon landings left a bunch of trash behind and thousands of pieces from our space program orbit the Earth. Be it an old piece of spacecraft, a dead satellite or the lost astronaut glove, space junk traveling at 17,500 miles an hour could pass right through a space walker and ruin the whole vacation. Even in the vastness of space the problem of space junk is a serious one.
Space junk, toxic propellants and even the potential biological contamination of other worlds like Mars are very serious issues. Protecting the environment of space must be addressed from the clean up to the prevention.
Are there ethical limits to space travel?
Are there ethical limits to traveling the limitless universe? Not exploring space would be unethical. We must pursue space travel for the sake of all humanity. A sustainable space travel industry means that we have progressed towards sustaining biosphere systems, most notably our Earth, and the regenerative ecosystems that sustain life inside our spacecraft and space hotels.
A sustainable space tourism industry ensures that if man-made global warming or a meteor strike by Mother Nature endangers human life on Earth, we have a chance of sustaining human life in space and on other planets. Someday the Earth will become uninhabitable. Before then, humanity must move off planet or become extinct.
Our children’s future depends on making space tourism happen. Without space tourism, we will not develop the infrastructure necessary to create a space travel industry. A sustainable space travel industry will ensure humanity’s destiny.
In Summation
Market research indicates that millions of people want to travel to space to float weightless in zero gravity and look back at Earth. The historic flight of Dennis Tito made space tourism a legitimate industry. The next space tourists will travel in pairs. With the advent of sub-orbital space flights, thousands of people will become space tourists.
A sustainable space tourism industry is the catalyst for larger space travel infrastructure and our ability to sustain life off Earth in the frontier of space. By participating in the sustainable space tourism industry, tourism professionals play a very important role in sustaining our species.
Closing
Earth may always be our home, but it will not always be our destination. Space tourism is changing the world.
Like the astronauts, space tourists who have seen earth from space and experienced weightlessness will come home with new and profound perceptions about themselves and their place in the world. Japanese science fiction calls this change of consciousness New Evolution. Others have labeled it the Overview Effect or Spaceship Earth Consciousness. The farther out we as a species travel the more we get to know ourselves.
When you and your family take your first space vacation, float weightless and look back at the Earth, you will be flying in a new kind of personal freedom. Like those who have gone before you, you will be transformed forever in the way you relate to the world around you, other people and yourself.
Space is the new frontier of tourism and we are all pioneers. Together, we can change the world.
Thank you. Have a great orbit!
1 Commission of European Communities, November, 2003. Space: The new European Frontier for an Expanding Union. Back to the text
2 E. Anderson, Space Adventures, The Steps to Space presentation. Back to the text
3 P. Collins, July 2003, Space Tourism Market Demand and the Transportation Infrastructure. Back to the text
4 D. Weber, February 2003, Public Space Markets - What We Know and What We Don’t Know. Back to the text
5 D. Weber, February 2002, The Ascent Study - Understanding the Market Environment for the Follow-on to the Space Shuttle. Back to the text
6 P. Collins, July 2003, Space Tourism Market Demand and the Transportation Infrastructure. Back to the text
7 P. Collins, July 2003, Space Tourism Market Demand and the Transportation Infrastructure. Back to the text
8 P. Collins, July 2003, Space Tourism Market Demand and the Transportation Infrastructure. Back to the text
9 P. Collins, July 2003, Space Tourism Market Demand and the Transportation Infrastructure. Back to the text
