Space Tourism Case Study

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Over fifty years ago, when Yuri Gagarin crossed the Earth’s orbit, his spacecraft was not even equipped to land with crew on board. Today, we have landed 12 humans on the moon and maintain a permanently manned space station – with this level of advancement in space exploration, the trend towards its commercialization is an obvious development.

Space tourists are travelers who pay for their passage into space. The trend started with entrepreneurs like Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth paying upwards of $20 million for a trip to the International Space Station. Since then, over 50 different companies world-over are actively investing and lobbying to make commercial spaceflights a regular feature of the future. Given the limited number of spacefaring nations today, these companies are largely based in USA and Russia, with other …show more content…

ISRO required less investment to send Chandrayaan to Mars, than Hollywood did to make Gravity – and that impressively small budget was, to a great extent, attributed to the lower cost of Indian engineering. In 2011, the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies Dehradun, under Professor Ram Jakhu of the Institute of Air and Space Law, Mcgill University, conducted a pilot study exploring the scope of a space tourism industry in India, which suggests that India, by using this key advantage, could reduce the overall cost of commercial space travel and become a major competitor in the commercial spaceflight sector. At present, anyone looking to buy a seat to outer space with, say, Virgin Galactic, will have to dish out roughly $200,000. If India can bring that figure down to $150,000, it will not only be a competitive player in the market, but will also have created a domestic market for space tourism amongst its own upper crust, which could consist of up to 15,000 passengers a

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