Space Tourism Revisited, Again

One of the advantages of writing a blog for 20 years is that you get a feel for what is new and for what seems new but is actually old. Space tourism falls into the latter category. I wrote my first piece on space tourism in 2004 when Burt Rutan was predicting 100,000 space tourists annually in 10 years. In contrast, I argued that rockets were far too unsafe a technology on which to build a tourism industry:

The problem is safety. Simply put, rockets remain among the least safe means of transportation ever invented. Since 1980 the United States has launched some 440 orbital launch rockets (not including the Space Shuttle). Nearly five percent of those rockets have experienced total failure, either blowing up or wandering so far from course as to be useless. The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety — it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?

Ten years later there weren’t 100,000 space tourists but Richard Branson was predicting a more modest (!) 10,000 space tourists by 2022. Well, 2022 came and went and space tourism has yet to get off the ground. Overall, rockets still look very unsafe. Is anyone surprised? Blue Origin, for example has had 1 total failure in 22 flights, 4.5%. SpaceX has by far the best record with–generously not including test flights–1 total failure in 289 Falcon flights, .34%. That’s great and especially impressive given that Falcon flies much higher than other rockets! But wingsuit flying, no one’s ideas of a safe sport, is still safer than a SpaceX flight! (.2%) and commercial airlines are running at many orders of magnitude safer at .00034%.

Thus, after 20 years, I don’t see much reason to update. Like climbing Mount Everest or wingsuit flying, we might see a few flights a year catering to the rich and foolhardy but we have a long way to get before we get fat guys with cameras in space.