To many, “space tourism” still sounds like something out of The Jetsons. But it’s becoming closer and closer to a reality every day.
On July 11, 2021, Richard Branson reached suborbital space in a rocket designed and built by Virgin Galactic. It was the first time that someone went to space on a rocket that they had financed. Just nine days later, Jeff Bezos did the same in a rocket created by his own company, Blue Origin. Clearly, Bezos’s and Branson’s companies will be grappling for dominance in the early waves of space tourism, although they’ll face competition from private companies in India and China as well.
But a quick jaunt to suborbital space is just the beginning. Longer voyages for space travelers are currently being planned. Elon Musk’s SpaceX program, for example, hopes to take civilian passengers to the moon in 2023. (Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has already booked all the seats on one flight—and he’s looking for eight companions to join him.)
These new developments are extremely exciting for wannabe space tourists, offering the promise of increasingly accessible space travel in the decades to come. But they give rise to even bigger questions about our future beyond Earth. Once space tourism becomes commonplace, what will come next?
The ultimate goal of our efforts to reach space has always been something grander than quick getaways with exotic views. These recent achievements and plans are just stepping stones towards what I believe is our destiny: permanent human communities on other planets.
It’s human nature to chase the horizon. Homo sapiens have made their home in every terrestrial biome, surviving and thriving in the planet’s most challenging and inhospitable landscapes. The human instinct to explore, expand and adapt is written in our first steps out of Africa and all of our journeys since.
Clearly, this notion is very much on the minds of the people at the forefront of space tourism. As Elon Musk has said on Twitter, “Make humanity a multiplanet species!”
What will our path towards long-term human habitation in space look like? Here’s my guess.
We’re witnessing the beginning of the first stage: suborbital flight for civilian passengers. This is what Bezos and Branson are already attempting to provide. The second stage will be orbiting hotels, like Orbital Assembly Corporation’s Voyager Station, which is slated for a grand opening in 2027. The third stage will take this concept and expand upon it, allowing for not just short-term stays at hotels but permanent living arrangements in structures that orbit our moon, Mars, or other celestial bodies in our planetary neighborhood. In the fourth stage, we’ll actually build habitable structures on the surfaces of those celestial bodies. And the fifth stage? True intergalactic travel.
The first four stages are entirely possible within the next 15 years. But that is our limit—for now. With our current technology, anything beyond our own solar system is out of reach. That’s not to say it will always be that way.
I like to think of us, the human species, as being in our “caterpillar” phase. Our world is still, metaphorically, two-dimensional; we’re stuck on the surface, unable to take to the air. For the immediate future, human technology is putting a decisive limit on how far we’re able to venture from our home planet. But eventually, every caterpillar goes through its transformation and gains wings that allow it to leave its two-dimensional world behind. For us humans, our “wings” will be the development of faster-than-light travel.
After that metamorphosis, the whole universe will be ours to explore.
