Space Tourism

The idea of space tourism has been around for a while, the date that is most synonymous with space tourism would probably be April 28, 2001 when Dennis Tito became the first person to pay for space travel. The two companies who have been the leaders of innovation with regard to space tourism have been Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace. Im sure the idea of space tourism has been around a lot longer than these two companies but the reason you most likely never heard of them is obvious, the amount of money and technical ability required is exponentially large. Most people could not imagine owning a cabin class airplane because of the amount of money necessary just for the airplane, not including maintenance, fuel, or a place to store it, we are talking about $200 million. Well any craft with a space prefix is going to be so much more many than that most people aren't crazy enough to even dream of such a feat, we are now talking a multi billion dollar endeavor.

As far as training required for the space traveler goes, it is pretty non existent. The regulations governing space tourism are found in 14 CFR Part 415 - 440 and they state that any space traveler must give written consent that they understand the risks involved with space flight and they give their consent to proceed with the flight (Federal Register). While the FAA recommends that a pre flight physical be preformed on the passenger there is no regulation that requires it. The flight crew regs are by far the most interesting, the FAA has mandated that the pilots be qualified as a pilot with the FAA and have a current medical within the last year. This is extremely surprising because the only stipulation the FAA has placed upon space flight is that a student or sport pilot cannot be at the controls of the vehicle, which qualifies a surprisingly large amount of people (Superville, D).In my opinion the regulations need to be quite a bit more restrictive, it seems as if its common sense that they would require anyone at the controls of a space vehicle to undergo specific intensive training on the physics of space flight which are very different from terrestrial flight.

The future of human space travel looks good in my opinion. While I do believe that it is going to be another 50 years before the average middle class working man can experience space, I do believe that maybe in the next 100 years it will be almost the same as commercial air travel. If you think back to the invention of the airplane that dates back almost 100 years, but was not until 50 years after that that it was considered a reliable means of transportation. The space shuttle has been around since the 1970's and we are approaching the 50 year mark. I am hesitant to put space travel on the same time frame as commercial aviation experienced because it is obviously a lot more involved but i think if we double those figures given the complexity of space travel it will be almost consistent with commercial air travel.

Like I said earlier, it is shocking to me that the requirements for flight crew be so minimal. While i'm sure that companies like Virgin Galactic would never dream of hiring a pilot with such a minimal amount of experience it still should be worth noting that if they didnt want to and their goal was to keep costs back they could hire a pilot with the same amount of experience or less than myself, which would be awesome and a dream come true for myself, it could spell a nightmare for the industry with regard to safety and experience (Superville, D). From my understanding, with regard to management of a space tourism operation the only stipulation is that the person or persons have the ability and knowledge to know how to operate a income based business (Levin, A). This regulation is somewhat shocking because you would think it would require more restrictions with regard to space tourism but it still is not as shocking to me as the fact that a private pilot legally could pilot a spacecraft.

Federal Register. (2006, December 15). Retrieved September 29, 2015, from http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2006-12-15/pdf/E6-21193.pdf

Levin, A. (2014, November 16). Space tourism industry may soon face federal regulation - The Boston Globe. Retrieved September 29, 2015, from https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/11/16/space-tourism-industry-may-soon-face-federal-regulation/AAoFHJAeg9ll0EPlJBCESI/story.html

Superville, D. (2005, December 30). Gov't issues proposed space tourism rules. Associated Press. Retrieved from http://www.space.com/1904-gov-issues-proposed-space-tourism-rules.html