The curvature of Earth seen from orbitSpace tourism is the recent phenomenon of tourists paying for flights into space pioneered by Russia.As of 2009, orbital space tourism opportunities are limited and expensive, with only the Russian Space Agency providing transport.
The price for a flight brokered by Space Adventures to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft is $20–28 million.
Infrastructure for a suborbital space tourism industry is being developed through the construction of spaceports
in numerous locations, including California, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Florida, Virginia, Alaska, Wisconsin, Esrange
in Sweden as well as the United Arab Emirates. Some use the term "personal spaceflight" as in the case of the
Personal Spaceflight Federation.
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactics one of the leading potential space tourism groups, is planning to begin passenger service
a board the VSS Enterprise, a Scaled Composites SpaceShipTwo type spacecraft. The initial seat price will be
$200,000, but that price is expected to eventually fall to $20,000. To date, over two hundred people have made
down payments on bookings. Headed by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Virgin Galactic hopes to be the first
private space tourism company to regularly send civilians into space. A citizen astronaut will only require three days of training before spaceflight. SpaceShipTwo will be a scaled up version of SpaceShipOne, the spacecraft which claimed the Ansari X Prize. high. This goes beyond the internationally defined boundary between Earth and space of 100 km. S The glider will employ a "feathering" technique to manage drag during the
unpowered descent and landing. SpaceShipTwo will use a single hybrid rocket motor to launch from mid-air after
detaching from a mother ship at 50,000 feet, instead of NASA's space shuttle's ground-based launch.
