Despite becoming more frequent, tourist trips to space are still far from being cheap or affordable for most of the world’s population.
Blue Origin, a company owned by Jeff Bezos (from Amazon) that will take the second Brazilian – after Marcos Pontes – to space on Saturday (4), does not announce how much each ticket sells for. But last year, she organized an auction to sell her first ticket, which sold for US$ 28 million (R$ 133.7 million in current values).
The high value can be related to the originality of the action. In 2022, in another Blue Origin auction, a seat was for US$ 8 million (R$ 38.2 million).
At Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, bookings are already more affordable — by today’s space tourism standards. For US$ 450 thousand (R$ 2.1 million) it is possible to reserve a seat for a suborbital flight. So far, the company has only made one flight with a full cabin, on July 11, 2021. The next one is expected to take place in 2023.
Space tourism has increased due to a technological change. Before, spacecraft used to be discarded after a flight, which greatly increased the costs of the enterprise, which ended up being restricted to public initiatives.
Currently, however, both companies and governments have developed equipment that can be reused, which reduces values and makes travel more accessible.
The New Shepard capsule, the vehicle that will take the second Brazilian into space, is recovered and retreaded to be used again, for example. The same goes for the module launcher.
With the possibility of reuse, companies can recover the investments made in the development of the vehicle, and the trend is that prices continue to fall.
Last year, Blue Origin made several flights. In one of them, one of the passengers was Bezos himself, accompanied by his brother Mark, the aviator Wally Funk and the student Oliver Daemen. The company also took Canadian actor William Shatner, 91, known for playing Captain James T. Kirk in the sitcom “Star Trek”) into space.
In addition to Bezos’ company and Virgin Galactic, another important name in the sector is Elon Musk’s SpaceX, responsible for Inspiration4 – the first all-civilian mission to orbit the Earth, carried out in 2021. The rivals only carried out suborbital flights to the time.
For Inspiration4, the commander and creator of the mission Jared Isaacman, would have paid, according to Time magazine, US$ 200 million (R$ 954.9 million) for four seats. To choose one of the members of the flight, a lottery was held, which raised US$ 113 million (R$ 539.5 million).
