Inexpensive Civilian Space Flights are Around the Corner

With the alignment of recent political and commercial interests, the near orbital space flights will significantly go down in price in the next few decades opening up doors for space tourism.

It's been several years since Space Adventures Inc. with Russia's RSA launched their first commercial customers in space for $20M each. However, the future promises much cheaper flights available to a wider range of civilians within a decade or so. After the breakup of USSR and the end of the Cold War NASA's funding has decreased. At this point most of their effort concentrated under the umbrella of exploration is targeting past-Moon missions, like Mars Exploration Rover, leaving the orbital space and the only Earth's satellite to the commercial sector.

The key to affordable space tourism is spacecrafts built with commercial purpose in mind. One great idea was to motivate a private sector with a large prize. After the launch of X Prize competition with $10M prize to the first company who builds a spacecraft able to take 3 people to near-orbital heights two times in a week, a number of designs made it to the finals with SpaceCraft1 winning the competition in October 2004.

Google announced its Lunar X Prize competition in September 2007 and has already 15 registered teams with deadline set to December 31, 2010 (2014 latest) to send a robot to the Moon, rover it for half a kilometer and transmit visual information back!

Space Adventures Inc., the same company that launched Denis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth to space, announced the plan to deliver up to 3 civilians to the far side of the Moon as early as 2010 for $100M per seat. Now, that's a bit pricey, but it's a first step for non-government sponsored Moon exploration!

I don't know what other superpowers are thinking about this topic, but if the governments would not allow their commercial sector to enter that business, they would miss out a lot of opportunities in innovation, publicity and financial areas. I think opening up part of the orbital space is a great idea that will inspire people of all ages around the world, motivate the creative minds and cruise us through the Space Age with larger benefits for humanity.

Links:
Peter Diamandis' TED talk on X Prize
Holiday in Outer Space
SpaceCraft1
Google Lunar X Prize
Moon tourism
Picture of Martian sunset taken from Gusev's crater (Mars)