Oct 4, Sputnik Day - Start of the Space Age

It will still be VERY expensive for a very long time. Some here have derided the Tesla Roadster as a rich man's toy. A trip to space is going to cost many, many Tesla Roadsters. There are many schemes (most of them fantasy, not science) for reducing the amount of fuel it takes to put a person into space, but even the plausible ones are a long ways off. And the multiple-redundant life-support systems are prohibitively expensive.

Early commercial space ventures such as Space X and Virgin Galactic may have promotional raffles or lotteries, but the number of people getting a free ride will be small if any, and only the fabulously wealthy will be able to afford to buy a ticket. It will be many decades before "thousands" of people have been to space. And if the economy collapses because we fail to address serious financial weaknesses, there may be no more space flights at all.

 

I celebrated by wasting $32 (for my wife and I) to go see Gravity. Great movie, though I'm not sure ANY movie is worth $16 a piece (at 4:30PM too!!!!)

As for space tourism, it's about time. As with everything, the more it happens and the more people get involved the cheaper it becomes.

 

There is no way around the fact that it takes a great deal of energy to lift a heavy object through the gravitational well from the surface of the Earth to the altitude of space. Add to the weight of the human(s) the weight of the life-support systems. At present, and probably for the next few decades, and maybe forever, the only way to do this is to burn a lot of fuel in an enormously heavy rocket. The weight of the rocket adds to the amount of fuel needed, since you have to lift the rocket as well as its fuel and the space capsule.

Space tourism is already a reality (the Russians will take you) but it is and probably will always be for the fabulously wealthy, and possibly for the very few selected for promotional purposes, or as the result of some company's space lottery.

Maybe Virgin Galactic will get the price down from 20 million to five million dollars. For $250,000 they'll promise you (at some future date) six minutes of weightlessness. Basically an extended ride on a version of the "vomit comet." But while you may technically be in space, it's hardly "space tourism." A few days in the space station is more like $50 million. That may come down, but it's never going to be a workingman's vacation. Not in the lifetime of anyone alive today, anyway.

I think it would be cool to visit the space station and do a space walk (another $15 million on top of the 50 above) except that I get motion sick, so I'd be miserable the whole trip.