SpaceX and space tourism agency Space Adventures are partnering on a mission to send four private citizens into orbit on a pioneer excursion.
The announcement comes after SpaceX sent their Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station for the first time in March 2019 and then successfully tested a simulated rocket failure on Jan. 19, proving its preparedness to send people into orbit with Space Adventures.
“This historic mission will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it, and we are pleased to work with the Space Adventures’ team on the mission,” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has teased the idea of space tourism as a business for a few years now, though he’s been overly optimistic about how soon that could happen. The company announced in early 2017 that it had accepted undisclosed payments from two customers for a trip around the Moon using Crew Dragon and the Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX said at the time that the trip would happen by the end of 2018. But in September 2018, the company announced that it now intends to send one of those passengers Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the Moon using the company’s massive, yet-to-be-built Big Falcon Rocket.
SpaceX has similarly had to delay the first Crew Dragon flight with NASA astronauts as it worked through the process of certifying the spacecraft with NASA. That flight is now supposed to take place later this year.
Other private spaceflight companies are vying to establish the space tourism market. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are in the running, though both of those companies are promising far briefer experiences. Virgin Galactic says it plans to send its first space tourists up later this year where they will experience a few minutes of weightlessness in the company’s plane-like spaceship. Blue Origin is promising customers a similar amount of time in space, though in a spacecraft that’s more similar to SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
Nobody has launched into orbit from the U.S., including NASA astronauts, since 2011 when the space shuttle program ended.
