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NASA has announced to introduce space tourism by opening up International Space Station (ISS). This will allow private citizens to visit space for about a month long vacation.
.@Space_Station is open for commercial business! Watch @Astro_Christina talk about the steps we're taking to make our orbiting laboratory accessible to all Americans. pic.twitter.com/xLp2CpMC2x
— NASA (@NASA) June 7, 2019
The execution will be by private commercial entities that will ensure crew composition and training for space journey and medical requirement, as a result, two companies were hired by NASA.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Boeing are the companies approached by NASA for the mission.
NASA space tourism: Expense
It is to be said that the price will add up to be $35,000 a night, per astronaut. Therefore, NASA’s estimated cost of a flight will fall around $50 million per seat. In addition, NASA will be charging for basic facilities from visitors like food, storage and communication in the station.
Space tourism by NASA
image credit- CNBC news
About ISS
NASA is not the first one to open space tourism. However, in past NASA had not allowed any commercial use of the space station and restricted astronauts for doing any profit based research.
ISS was build at the beginning of 1998 with Russia, hence NASA does not own the station. Whereas, Russia has used the station for commercial reasons.
US businessman, Dennis Tito is the first tourist to visit space in 2001. He paid Russia around $20 million for a space round trip.
However, ISS has been used before for commercial research and development by many companies. But this effort is to open the scope further by including space tourism, as NASA explained in a press release.
Space tourism will be done only twice a year, so it has a limited profit margin. The main focus of this mission is to privatise the space station and to build up resources for the Moon Mission of 2024. NASA looks forward to the first Moon Mission of this decade.
