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Study Shows Large Space Tourism Market
HobbySpacer writes: "A serious market study has finally been done on space tourism and it shows a substantial market, even for brief sub-orbital flights. The
Futron/Zogby study of high income individuals found that 19% would pay $100k for a sub-orbital flight. Furthermore, 7% would pay $20M to go to the Space Station (if they had the money.) The percentages go up if the prices could come down, especially with availability of private orbital facilities. With around 30 million high-net-worth households ($500,000+) in the US, this indicates a market of several million for suborbital on the short term and eventually for orbital. We can hope that like previous expensive luxuries, e.g. jet travel and ocean cruises, the wealthy will pull the prices down to a level reachable by the rest of us."
Space tourism is a great idea.
1. Space research programs are strapped for cash.
2. Rich people have lots of cash.
3. Space research has long-term, not-very-tangible goals.
4. People who have lots of cash generally made it by focussing on short-term, tangible goals. Therefore, they are not likely to spend money on space research.
5. However, "going into space" is immediate and extremely tangible, not to mention fun.
6. So rich people will spend their cash on space tourism. And the profits will go to space research. Great!
Most people with worths between 500K and 1000K would be insane to pay 100 grand for a sub-orbital flight.
Think about it this way: Most people's equity is in their house, which, for "wealthy" families, usually costs around 500K.
So maybe they have their mortgage half-paid-off (which is uncommon). That leaves 250K-750K of money. Again, most, i'd say 75% or so, of that is in a retirement account, or some other form of non-liquid asset.
So you have somewhere between 60K and 190K of liquid assets. Do you really want to spend half-to-all of your assets on a sub-orbital flight lasting several minutes, at most?
In my book, you'd have to be insane.
The "wealthy people" discussed here are probably in double digits of million dollars of assets, or at least $5M or so.
Either that, or the "researchers" just asked "would you do this if you had the cash?" which is, pretty much, a bull-shit question. Its like saying "would you buy 30 houses, if you had the cash?" The people who *actually* have the cash still don't consider themselves "rich" enough to have it, as wealthy people tend to invest their money.
As noted in the excellent book "The millionaire next door," high income, and especially high expenditures and consumption, or a "rich" lifestyle, almost never correlate to a large amount of assets. People who live such a lifestyle usually never save up enough to maintain a large amount of assets.
Still am sure there are thousands of people who would pay for this stuff. But it is definately NOT the incredibly large amount of people they make it out to be.
It was only 80 years ago that "horseless carriages" were the "rich-man's toy".
First of all, $500k isn't a high net worth, that's not even upper-middle class, it's just plain middle class. $500k is a guy with a house, a car, and not much else.
Secondly, the study itself was of people with $1m net worths, or $250k annual salaries, where did the submitter get that $500k figure anyway?
Lastly, a higher percentage of people said they'd pay $20m than is possible. Fewer than 7% of all people with a net worth > $1m have a net worth that would allow $20m to be spent on a vacation, which is contrary to what this study shows.
Who fucking cares?
maybe i just missed it, since it is a rather lengthy description, but i didn't see anything that mentioned actually GOING to the ISS. it just talks about training and simulators and the like. i sure as hell wouldn't pay $20M to fly on a plane that *feels* like 0-g
Approximatly 10% of the population (30 million) have a household net worth of $500k, but I'm sure that includes their house, cars, etc. My guess is that even people who outright own their houses don't have 100k spare cash. And hey, wouldn't it be more fun to go on a year vacation than go for a suborbital flight for a hour or so?
I'd guess that the a lot of the 7% say they would do it if they had 100k, but if they really had it, they'd think of something more fun, or useful.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14