From Space Tourism to Commercial Suborbital Travel

Abstract

After several announcements last years, the recent successful flights with Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson as passengers have brought the space tourism topic back at the top of news headlines. Indeed, several projects have undergone incremental and careful development steps last years to ensure a sufficient reliability of such flights with passengers on board. The perfect re-entry of both the New Shepard system of Blue Origin and the Unity system of Virgin Orbit in July 2021 are now opening the path for commercial space tourism flights, with several hundreds of candidates having paid either substantial advance payments or even the total ticket price and a rising demand after these demonstrations. This evolution can be compared with the first flights in the aeronautical field starting in 1919, when, at the end of WW1, experienced pilots and proven (ex-military) planes were used to carry air tourists at short turn-around flights. This rapidly evolved a few years later in regular commercial Point-to-Point air traffic, with the first air connection Paris London Paris. We can easily forecast a similar evolution in suborbital transport of cargo and passengers after the first wave of space tourism. Similar as with the first aviation tourism, where passengers got a first sensation of flying and were then brought back to the starting point after a few minutes, suborbital space experience will soon evolve in so called pointto-point suborbital flights, covering intercontinental travel in 60-80 minutes in one go, which now takes up more than 21 hours, like a trip London-Sydney with one stopover. This article will focus on the feasibility of such development, focusing in the first place on the potential business case and the economic rationale. It will be demonstrated that for ‘time-poor, cash-rich’ people such suborbital intercontinental travel will be a viable option and a potential market.