Bezos's Space Tourism Plan Is Delayed Again — How Many Times Has Space Travel Broken Its Promises?

At least it's possible in the foreseeable future.

Jeff Bezos's space company, Blue Origin, recently announced it is pushing back the crewed space tourism plan it had set for next year. Now it says April 2019.

Space exploration has been Bezos's dream since childhood. In an interview with the Miami Herald, he said he had already laid out his vision of a future in space in his high school graduation speech, at 18. In 2000 he founded his private space company, Blue Origin.

After more than a decade of quiet work, Blue Origin showed off its crewed rocket, New Shepard, on its website in 2015. The crew capsule holds six passengers and carries them to the edge of space, 101 kilometers up. Rocket and capsule then separate, and the rocket comes down at a designated site to be recovered and flown again. After 41 minutes of flight, the capsule lands too, slowed by parachutes.

In March 2016, Bezos announced that New Shepard would be tested in 2017 and would fly paying passengers to space in 2018. That plan has now slipped.

Sending ordinary people to space: it starts with a NASA program thirty years ago

The first human in space was the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who circled the Earth once aboard Vostok 1 in 1961. More and more crewed missions succeeded after that, and going to space became a wish shared by many people — though few ever got it granted.

In 1985, NASA picked Christa McAuliffe out of 11,400 ordinary Americans to join its space shuttle program and fly her into space. But McAuliffe died in the Challenger Disaster in 1986, and the program was stopped.

Another trip canceled by a space disaster was the Journalist-in-Space program. NASA chose the American journalist Miles O'Brien and planned to send him up in 2003, but the plan was dropped after the Columbia Disaster in January 2013.

The Soviet Union and several British companies worked together in the 1990s on “Project Juno,” which was to put the British chemist Helen Sharman in space in 1991. It ran out of money.

Russia's ten-million-dollar space tour is probably the only one ever delivered

After the Soviet Union collapsed, spacecraft development was expensive and the lease on the space center in Kazakhstan had to be paid, so Russia was looking for new ways to raise money. At the same time MirCorp, the commercial space group that ran Russia's Mir space station, was trying to make a profit from commercial projects aboard the station.

The two of them built a space travel service for ordinary people. The first tourist to reach space was the American Dennis Tito.

In 2001, Tito lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard the Soyuz TM-32, toured the International Space Station and spent eight days in space.

The trip cost him $20 million.

After Tito, six more non-astronauts took the same Russian trip, among them the South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth and the American scientist Gregory Olsen.

Private space companies promise more, and not one has delivered

Then more and more commercial companies moved into the space business, each announcing a space travel plan of its own.

Virgin Galactic was the first private space company to build a crewed spacecraft. In 2004 the astronaut Mike Melvill flew to space aboard its SpaceShipOne. In 2005, Virgin Galactic teamed up with the aerospace design firm Scaled Composites to spend $250 million on five SpaceShipTwo vehicles and two WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, and to fly 100 passengers to space as early as 2008.

The plan was later pushed to 2015, and now, as you can see, it still hasn't happened.

One reason may be the crash in 2014. As SpaceShipTwo entered suborbital flight its rocket engine blew up, killing one pilot and injuring the other. Even so, plenty of people were still willing to pay $250,000 for a ticket, including stars like Justin Bieber and Katy Perry.

Also hot in recent years is Elon Musk's space company, SpaceX. It began by hauling cargo to the International Space Station for the United States and later moved into space tourism. Its Dragon spacecraft was supposed to carry astronauts to the station this year, but in December 2016 that was pushed to May 2018.

In March last year SpaceX also said it would fly two paying passengers around the moon in 2018. As Musk described it, a Falcon Heavy rocket and a new version of the Dragon capsule would take them up from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Musk has a bigger vision still: colonizing Mars by 2022. At the International Astronautical Congress last month, he introduced the new rocket he is developing, the B.F.R., which could carry 100 people to Mars at a time on a flight of 80 to 120 days. At the same event he pushed the crewed Mars mission back to 2024.

The American company Space Adventures worked with Russia's federal space agency in 2001 to build the Explore M-55X spacecraft, said to be able to carry five passengers to space. The project stalled because it “burned too much money.”

They tried to bring the plan to China as well. In 2013 the Chinese travel company Tansuo Lüxing (“Discovery Travel”) signed a deal with the Dutch space company SXC under which Chinese tourists could pay $95,000 to fly to the edge of space aboard XCOR's Lynx Mark One. Test flights were to start in March 2014 and commercial flights by the end of that year. That didn't happen either.

The spacecraft came from a space company called XCOR, which had rolled out a whole series of plans to send tourists up: the Future Astronaut Program, a trip to the edge of space; the Rookie Astronaut Program, which threw in three nights of luxury lodging; the Advanced Astronaut Program, which added other exploration activities... Except that on May 31 last year XCOR announced all of them were postponed indefinitely......

Some space tourism projects are less spacey than others — the helium balloon trip from World View (WorldView), which climbs 39 kilometers for a look at the Earth, or XCOR's Lynx Mark One, which can get 61 kilometers off the ground... So far not one person has gone up.

Hotel chains joined in, with even less to show for it

In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, and the US-Soviet space race began. In 1958 the United States set up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). That same year, Hilton, one of the world's largest hotel chains, was first reported to be planning a hotel on the moon.

The rumor was never officially confirmed, but it kept turning up in science fiction films, until 1967, when Barron Hilton — son of the chain's founder, Conrad Hilton — became chairman and started putting the plan on the table.

Barron was a space fanatic who spent his life dreaming of the day he could cut the ribbon on a Hilton lunar hotel. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal he once described the hotel in detail: 100 rooms, a bar with a pianist, guests standing at the window to take in the view of the Earth from space...

The coverage set off a lot of talk. “We got hundreds, even thousands of letters asking about the moon hotel,” said Mike Young, the University of Houston professor who keeps the Hilton hotel archives. Hilton even printed moon hotel reservation cards and mock room keys.

After Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, Barron brought the plan up again: “We will have a hotel on the moon. I believe it!”

It never went anywhere. In 2009, Barron's son Steve Hilton said in an interview that the moon hotel plan had always been just talk, and people shouldn't take it too seriously.

Hilton was not the only company that wanted to take its business into space. Robert Bigelow, another American tourism magnate, had a similar idea.

In 1990 NASA started TransHab, a program to build an inflatable space module; it was killed in 2000 for lack of money. But Bigelow saw value in those ten years of research, and in 1999 he founded his space company, Bigelow Aerospace, and began working with NASA on a crewed module program.

In 2006, Bigelow announced that a space hotel would go up starting in 2014 and open for business in 2015. It didn't.

Still, next to Hilton's lunar hotel there has been some real progress: Bigelow Aerospace has been sending experimental modules into space since 2007, though nobody lives in them yet.

Recently it announced a partnership with the United Launch Alliance to put a habitat module in lunar orbit before 2020, as a berth for commercial lunar projects and a training site for NASA astronauts.

Then there is Galactic Suite, the space company that said it would finish a hotel in 2012 where guests could watch 15 sunrises a day; and the twin-tower hotel due in 2016 where guests could leap out of the water like dolphins as they swam... None of it came true.

Until rockets actually get cheap, none of these promises will be kept.

Cover image/Blue Origin