SpaceX will launch space tourism flight in two years

SpaceX has signed a deal for a tour around the Earth for four private clients, to take place in two years.

Marcia Dunn had the news for the AP:

SpaceX aims to launch up to four tourists into a super high orbit, possibly by the end of next year.

The private company is working with Space Adventures Inc. for the flight, officials announced Tuesday. Ticket prices are not being divulged but expected to be in the millions.

Space Adventures already has helped put tourists into orbit with trips to the International Space Station, working with the Russian space program.

For this trip, paying customers will skip the space station and instead orbit two to three times higher, or roughly 500 miles to 750 miles (800 kilometers to 1,200 kilometers) above Earth.

It’s a lofty goal that would approach the record 850-mile-high (1,370 kilometers) orbit achieved by Gemini 11′s Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon in 1966.

The tourist flight “will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement.

Elon Musk’s California-based SpaceX already is dabbling in space tourism, signing on a Japanese billionaire to fly to the moon in three or so years. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic also plan tourist trips to space, but these will be brief up-and-downs, not orbital.

The Verge’s Sean O’Kane wrote:

Space Adventures said the price of the mission will not be disclosed, and the two companies were light on other details, like what kind of preparation the tourists will have to go through. The companies did say Tuesday that the tourists will fly in the human-rated version of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and that they will orbit Earth at two to three times the roughly 250-mile height of the ISS.

SpaceX has spent the last few years building and testing out this new version of Dragon as part of a contract with NASA to shuttle astronauts to and from the ISS, after years of using the spacecraft to shuttle cargo to the space station. The private spaceflight company recently completed the second major flight test of the Crew Dragon, as it’s called, which demonstrated the capsule’s ability to escape an exploding rocket.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has teased the idea of space tourism as a business for a few years now, though he’s been overly optimistic about how soon that could happen. The company announced in early 2017 that it had accepted undisclosed payments from two customers for a trip around the Moon using Crew Dragon and the Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX said at the time that the trip would happen by the end of 2018. But in September 2018, the company announced that it now intends to send one of those passengers — Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — around the Moon using the company’s massive, yet-to-be-built Big Falcon Rocket. (It’s still unclear what happened to the second customer.)

Michael Sheetz from CNBC reported:

The mission is a “free-flyer,” meaning that it will not try to dock with the space station but instead will simply orbit the Earth before returning. Space Adventures founder Eric Anderson said that this mission will attempt to reach two to three times the altitude of the ISS, which orbits at an altitude of about 250 miles up.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, SpaceX last year had a deal with Bigelow Aerospace to fly individuals to the ISS for about $52 million per person. Although Bigelow later withdrew from that deal, the announcement came after NASA said it will open the ISS for “private astronaut missions of up to 30 days,” with the first mission as early as this year.