Space travel for the masses? Don’t be ridiculous

Space ‘tourism’ as performed by a pair of billionaires is, for now, merely an overpriced joyride for the ultra-rich. The journeys were heralded as marking a new era of “space tourism”, in which untrained people could become astronauts, a title previously reserved for highly trained professional scientists and pilots, to see the earth’s curvature and enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness. Similarly, Bezos’s Blue Origin, which flew higher than its archrival Virgin Galactic, also utilises advanced science with a fully automated two-part rocket system, requiring no pilots at all. They do not yet fly high enough to orbit earth and are therefore in a wholly different category to – say, NASA or SpaceX – founded by another very successful billionaire entrepreneur, Elon Musk – which has become NASA’s preferred launch vehicle, able to resupply the International Space Station or deploy new satellites. Blue Origin is also developing larger rockets, dubbed New Glen, which aspires to compete with SpaceX on longer distance space flights and Blue Moon, to create lunar landers in partnership with NASA.