Economic and Technical Evaluation of Suborbital Spaceflight for Space Tourism¹

Abstract

Extensive travel by air, sea, and land for pleasure and business is commonplace in modern life. In contrast, travel in space is only available, essentially, to a small number of highly trained government astronauts, and the public’s perception is that it cannot be otherwise. In fact, space tourism has already started evolving through a number of stages beginning with ground theme parks, space camps, zero gravity flights, and Soyuz flights to the International Space Station. Progress to suborbital trips with a brief experience of weightlessness will probably follow as a natural further development.

This study focuses on these near-term suborbital trips, examining suborbital vehicles that are in the development stage and comparing their capabilities. The investigation has three objectives: to provide an overview of the space tourism market as it currently exists and classify suborbital tourism flights within it; to determine if the investigated suborbital vehicles are technically feasible, by determining the maximum apogee altitude, estimating the necessary rocket engine propellant, and comparing systems qualitatively; to develop a statistical-analytical model called Suborb-Transcost to estimate the ticket prices for a realistic scenario in order to verify whether the launch vehicles are economically feasible.