Going Off-Topic | How expensive is a ticket to space? @GoingOffTopic | Uploaded September 2020 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
Space tourism is officially here. Over 600 people bought tickets to the cosmos from #VirginGalactic for $250,000—including celebrities like Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio. Those flights are set to take off in 2021, but they’re far from the only option to take a trip to space. Rocket companies are lining up to launch you off the Earth.
🚨CORRECTION🚨As pointed out in the pinned comment: Virgin Galactic plans to send folks on *suborbital trips* — not low-earth orbit. Low-earth orbit (LEO) is 160km-1000km above Earth (ESA) whereas Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo plans to take tourists ~83km above Earth.
In addition to the Richard Branson-founded rocket company, fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have also founded their own similar companies: Blue Origin and #SpaceX, respectively. And each one has it’s own plan on how it might launch regular people into space.
Hitch a ride on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, named after Alan Shepard who was the first American astronaut in space. (He also famously hit golf balls on the moon!) Or climb aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which recently launched it’s first crewed flight with astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley in May 2020.
Or, go all-out and treat yourself in the way that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa did: pay a secret price to SpaceX to take a round-trip flight around the moon with half-a-dozen of your closest friends. His project is called #dearMoon and is planned to launch in 2023 as an art project to promote world peace.
But if Virgin Galactic’s $250,000 price point sounds a bit more manageable—get ready for an out-of-this-world experience. From your Virgin Galaction/Under Amour-designed customer “spacewear system” (it’s technically not a space suit!), to your launch at Spaceport America (the first FAA-classified spaceport in the US), to the SpaceShipTwo cabin: we cover it all in this video.
00:00 How much would you pay to go to space?
01:18 Blue Origin New Shepard rocket
02:09 SpaceX Dragon capsule
02:55 dearMoon project by Yusaku Maezawa
04:00 Virgin Galactic: Pre-launch
05:22 The flight experience
07:04 Return to earth
Space tourism is officially here. Over 600 people bought tickets to the cosmos from #VirginGalactic for $250,000—including celebrities like Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio. Those flights are set to take off in 2021, but they’re far from the only option to take a trip to space. Rocket companies are lining up to launch you off the Earth.
🚨CORRECTION🚨As pointed out in the pinned comment: Virgin Galactic plans to send folks on *suborbital trips* — not low-earth orbit. Low-earth orbit (LEO) is 160km-1000km above Earth (ESA) whereas Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo plans to take tourists ~83km above Earth.
In addition to the Richard Branson-founded rocket company, fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have also founded their own similar companies: Blue Origin and #SpaceX, respectively. And each one has it’s own plan on how it might launch regular people into space.
Hitch a ride on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, named after Alan Shepard who was the first American astronaut in space. (He also famously hit golf balls on the moon!) Or climb aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which recently launched it’s first crewed flight with astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley in May 2020.
Or, go all-out and treat yourself in the way that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa did: pay a secret price to SpaceX to take a round-trip flight around the moon with half-a-dozen of your closest friends. His project is called #dearMoon and is planned to launch in 2023 as an art project to promote world peace.
But if Virgin Galactic’s $250,000 price point sounds a bit more manageable—get ready for an out-of-this-world experience. From your Virgin Galaction/Under Amour-designed customer “spacewear system” (it’s technically not a space suit!), to your launch at Spaceport America (the first FAA-classified spaceport in the US), to the SpaceShipTwo cabin: we cover it all in this video.
00:00 How much would you pay to go to space?
01:18 Blue Origin New Shepard rocket
02:09 SpaceX Dragon capsule
02:55 dearMoon project by Yusaku Maezawa
04:00 Virgin Galactic: Pre-launch
05:22 The flight experience
07:04 Return to earth
