The last time I wrote here about space tourism, in "Pushing the space elevator closer to reality," I told you that a round-trip ticket might cost only $20,000.
The sales season must have started, because prices are now down to $15,000, according to The Aerospace Corporation.
First, let's look at their business model, summarized by Ian Sample.
To gauge the potential market, Jay Penn and his colleague Charles Lindley used a 1995 survey that asked people how much they would be willing to pay for a ticket into space. From this they estimated that a price tag of around $15,000 a ticket would pull in about a million passengers a year. They then worked out how to bring the price per flight down to this level.
If I count correctly, the company is envisioning a market of $15 billion per year (without the help of Gartner).
Irony aside, how do they think they can reduce travel costs from several million dollars today to several thousands in a few years?
Penn and Lindley found that the cheapest and quickest way to get lots of people into space and back would be to develop a two-stage shuttle system. The first stage resembles a short, fat rocket with wings. This takes a smaller winged rocket to the edge of space, where it fires up its own motors to push it into Earth orbit.
The first stage glides back down to Earth to be refuelled for another launch. Meanwhile, the second stage docks with an orbiting space station, unloads its passengers, and collects previous passengers from the space station for the return trip.
With this approach, they forecast that the number of flights could reach 9,500 per year (please note: not 9,000 or 10,000, but 9,500).
They also plan to reduce costs by having little maintenance and by replacing liquid hydrogen by liquid hydrogen for fueling the rockets.
You'll need to revisit this column ten years from now to see if something real came out from these ideas.
Source: Ian Sample, New Scientist Print Edition, October 31, 2002
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