Sub-Orbital Space Tourism Contributes Nothing to Future Space Travel
I remember the very first sub-orbital space flights. I was a 15-year-old kid when the first such flights happened in 1961. It was really exciting. They were followed by orbital flights, and even people stepping on the moon. But, that was 60 years ago. The Virgin flight did no more than that first sub-orbital flight. It took some people 55 miles above the earth and lasted about an hour.
We all have dreams about the possibility of humans moving off the Earth to some other, unspoiled place that hasn't been damaged by human activity. Dreams. At this time, however, we're still using chemical rockets to go to space. As long as we are limited by such propulsion methods, we cannot reach any such unspoiled planet to colonize it. There just aren't any near enough, and we don't know where the closest one might be, really.
It's exciting to think about space travel. A few wealthy people will pay huge amounts of money for a brief sub-orbital flight, certainly, but they won't be going anywhere for very long. A really wealthy person might get to the International Space Station to orbit our home planet for a few weeks, but that would be a waste of space that could be used for actual research - not tourism, it seems to me.
So NASA isn't doing a lot of manned missions at this time. More information can be obtained with unmanned rovers and other craft. More information can be obtained from high-tech telescopes and research tools, too, about even more distant parts of the universe. NASA is seeking knowledge, at the same time as it is looking at alternative propulsion systems that might replace chemical rockets for longer, much faster movement outside of our immediate vicinity.
More can be learned, and for far less money, by keeping people on the ground while technology investigates other future options.
No doubt it is thrilling to take a ride on one of the commercial spacecraft, but that's a short-term thrill, and you'd soon be back on the planet. All of those "space ships" are limited by the chemical rocket used to boost them beyond the atmosphere. Virgin's craft will never, ever make more than a short, sub-orbital flight. We have known how to do that for 60 years. Where is the benefit? How does that help us leave the planet and move somewhere else?
It doesn't. Nope. We're working on new propulsion systems and exploring with technology. Eventually, one of those propulsion systems might allow us to think seriously about manned missions to distant places, but right now it's still just a dream. NASA knows what it is doing, and is making enormous strides in providing us with the information we will need. Someday. Not now. Not as long as we're still using chemical rockets. With those, the fuel is soon gone and we reach a limit of the distance humans can travel, even in a lifetime.
Research is ongoing, but results that can take us into deep space are decades away at a minimum.
Don't plan on taking a trip to some new planet in your lifetime, or even watching others do so. That's not happening. It's just not.
= new reply since forum marked as read
. . .about very little, and this is little more than a cock-wagging contest among billionaires.
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape-to-space-while-the-world-burns/
Space tourism will inevitably suck. Our billionaires won't find anything up there but a whole lot of time to sit with the gaping void in their hearts, which space certainly won't fill, while forcibly holding their asscheeks to a suctioning toilet seat, because they're constipated as hell from astronaut food.
The world is burning, and billionaires are arguably the people most responsible. But at least they will not be able to escape to some other, better place. They will live and die (alone, like all of us) on this beautiful, precious, one-in-a-gazillion planet.
