Space Tourism, Now and to Come

bart_scriv writes, "BusinessWeek looks at the latest in space tourism, from a $20 million Soyuz trip to a $200,000 ride via Virgin Galactic. The article looks at existing and planned opportunities, with a slide show of photos and artist's conceptions of vehicles and facilities. From the article: 'Among the other wonders of space is the planned Bigelow Aerospace space hotel. Similar in design to the International Space Station (which has kept a constant human presence in space since 2000), the hotel has a modular design that will allow it easily to expand. The key difference is that the hotel's modules will be inflatable. Bigelow Aerospace launched the Genesis I test module into orbit on July, 2006, and plans to send Genesis II in early 2007.'"

Comments

More junk to monitor

[Cyphertube]

As if there wasn't enough junk to try to monitor in space and worry about falling to earth, now we're going to have private enterprise try to make a buck or two off of going to space.

Government contractors worry me enough, but what happens to a space hotel when the business runs out of money? I can see this going through a boom and bust cycle like just about every new business, and I want to know. It's not like running lots of fiber optic cable and then going bankrupt. Who's going to take care of the degrading orbit of the hotel?

Re:More junk to monitor

[Tackhead]

> Government contractors worry me enough, but what happens to a space hotel when the business runs out of money? I can see this going through a boom and bust cycle like just about every new business, and I want to know. It's not like running lots of fiber optic cable and then going bankrupt. Who's going to take care of the degrading orbit of the hotel?

Gravity.

Interesting economic question: What's the salvage value of an abandoned ISS? If it costs $10000/lb to send something to orbit, the ISS is worth its weight in gold.

But if you buy an abandoned space station for $1.00, and use its $10000/lb "value" to finance the building of rockets that cost $1000/lb to send fuel into orbit before your space station's orbit degrades, you've just cut the value of an abandoned hunk of metal by a factor of ten. Oops, those were also your company's assets! The bank calls your loan, and you're sunk.

Then some other guy buys you out for pennies on the dollar, and flies your $1000/lb rockets to his space hotel, and makes a go of it.

I suspect that much like wiring a nation with fiberoptics, the early bird gets the worm... but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Re:Space Ball!

[TrippTDF]

You're being funny, but I think you might have a point there. How much money does the US spend on sporting events in a year? How many possibilities are there for weightless sports? I think once you bring your cost of launch down, this could become a sigificant revenue stream, but it's still at least 40 years away.

Armadillo Aerospace Test Hover Video

[Baldrson]

WMV or MPG video just posted by John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace's test hover.

Re:Inflatable != fragile

[AKAImBatman]

In fact everyone can now see for themselves what the Bigelow station looks like. Surprisingly, it looks a lot like just another space station. Seeing it deployed like that, it looks a heck of a lot sturdier than Slashdot impressions would lead you to believe. :)

3 words

[RsG]

Zero. G. Porn.

There's your 21st centure business model :-)

Although, cleaning up afterwards would be a challenge... ...and I don't even want to think about what would happen to the instruments if they tried zero-G Bukkake :-(

Interesting point

[zogger]

Are there any salvage laws yet? What is "abandoned" in space? Everything up there was at one point pretty darn valuable, just from the sheer launching costs let alone any tech it represents.

I would imagine that once private industry is up there all the time, that "space junk" will become a valuable resource and won't be allowed to just de orbit and burn up. They'll do something with it.