Can Commercial Space Tourism Fund NASA’s Return To The Moon?

Given that NASA now opens the International Space Station to tourists by 2020, is it enough to fund their manned mission to the moon by 2024?

By: Ringo Bones

Unbeknown to most people, the International Space Station does not belong to NASA, it was built with the help of Russia back in 1998 with the help of other space travel capable countries in order to participate in the mission and send up astronauts. The ISS have hosted space tourists with enough cash to spare before, like U.S. businessman Dennis Tito who back in 2001 had paid Russia around 20-million USD for the trip. Others followed his footsteps, the last being Cirque Du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte back in 2009. But this time, it would be different because the proceeds will be used by NASA to fund its return to the moon and as a means for the cash-strapped government funded space agency to financially disengage itself from the orbiting research lab. Given that the International Space Station has a projected lifetime of 40 years and it is already around half that, maybe the money earned and saved by NASA could also be used to build another space station 20 years from now.

Back in Friday, June 7, 2019, NASA’s chief financial officer Jeff DeWitt announced that it will open up the ISS to business ventures including space tourism by 2020. There will be two short private astronaut missions per year, said Robyn Gatens, deputy director of the ISS. The missions will be for stays of up to 30 days. As many as a dozen private astronauts could visit the ISS per year, NASA said.

Even though the rate for staying at the International Space Station is 35.000 USD a night – there are way more expensive honeymoon suites in Dubai with a going rate of 400,000 USD a night by the way – but the round trip bill via Soyuz launch system will cost you around 58-million USD. Expensive the trip may be but the view is literally out of this world.

Space tourism will not be the only way for NASA to make fiscal sense of the rather costly endeavor of space exploration. This would include startups developing techniques for building materials in conditions of weightlessness in which experiments conducted on early NASA Space Shuttle missions have proved to be of vital importance – i.e. ultra strong and yet lightweight metal alloys and protein crystals that can only be fabricated in weightless conditions. Also fiber optic cables can be of extraordinary quality when manufactured at weightless conditions. In terms of space commercialization that makes actual fiscal sense, it seems that space based industries have the potential to earn way more money than space tourism.