Eric Anderson: “keep your eye on space tourism”

Yesterday Eric Anderson, CEO of space tourism operator Space Adventures, spoke at the Global Travel & Tourism Summit in Washington. I wasn’t in attendance, but the conference organizers did post an excerpt of his talk, where he impresses upon attendees the future of space tourism:

Almost exactly 45 years ago the first manned space flight took place, and just last week from the same base in Kazakhstan another flight took off to the space station – the only hotel in space at present. But now there are three people who have paid $20 million each to spend ten days in space and become the world’s first space tourists, and this market will grow, so that soon there will be several hotels in space. This market is driving new technology being created only for this purpose. We will create a spaceport in Singapore and another in Emirates. We will use new rockets to provide suborbital flight, three minutes of weightlessness – space tourism-light – that could attract thousands of customers, and be worth $1 billion a year. And we’re trying to develop a trip round the dark side of the moon from the space station, and return to the space station for refuelling. You should all keep your eye on space tourism. It will grow over the next ten or twenty years.

It’s interesting that Anderson calls suborbital space tourism “space tourism-light”. It’s not necessarily inaccurate, of course: it is a lesser experience in many respects from orbital spaceflight. However, for most people, suborbital spaceflight is going to be the only even remotely accessible form of space tourism for the foreseeable future.