00:05now space tourism forecast to be worth more than six billion dollars a year from 2030 but with
00:12eye-watering ticket prices trips to space remain a distant dream for most of us our correspondent
00:17Siobhan McCall has the story thanks Sally well think of space tourism and something like the
00:23Blue Origin celebrity flight last year might come to mind or the Virgin Galactic tourist flight that
00:46included an 80 year old who paid $250,000 for a ticket 18 years before he took the journey
00:53well going into space means passing this the common line which marks its edge 100 kilometers
01:00and above mean sea level with tickets costing hundreds of thousands of dollars many people
01:05see space tourism as just a billionaire's playground but experts say there's more to it and that space
01:12tourism has wider benefits including opportunity to conduct experiments and the money put into the
01:18industry by billionaires allows for more exploration while moments like the Blue Origin celebrity
01:24flights raise public interest recently China's Lee Hong one successfully completed its maiden
01:30sub-autiful flight the spacecraft has a hundred percent reusable capsule designed to reduce launch costs
01:36it's been hailed as a milestone in the future of space tourism and what else could be on the horizon
01:42while this company is planning a luxury hotel with rooms for 400 guests and a spa and a cinema room
01:49there was suggestion it would open in 2027 but construction hasn't started or what about a stay on the moon
01:57well this hotel is supposed to open in 2032 and deposits cost as much as a million dollars but do
02:04people even want to travel to space in this article on market watch a US survey found that the majority
02:11of
02:11people thought space travel would be commonplace by the 2070s but 65% were quite happy staying on Earth
02:18and if you're quite happy to watch from afar then maybe this is your best option NASA is offering to
02:25fly your name to the moon it'll be on an SD card in the forthcoming Artemis 2 mission and they'll
02:31send
02:31you a digital boarding card here's my one more than 1.5 million people have signed up well Quinton Parker
02:38is
02:39professor and director of the laboratory for space research the University of Hong Kong it's likely to
02:45be I think at least 20 or 30 years I think before you know what you call ordinary like middle
02:50class
02:51budgets say would be available and if you're talking about you know what SpaceX stars with starship going to
02:59the International Space Station as paying customers you're talking about 50 million US dollars per seat
03:04there so I think a mass accessibility for ordinary people really relies on driving down costs through
03:12reusable rocket technologies really where you get economies of scale you know on competition that
03:16drive down things to where you know upper middle class or people might be able to afford a trip to
03:23space um uh in in the next uh 10 to 20 years now if you talk about hotels space hotels
03:29where you would
03:30stay I mean I remember 2001 a space obviously they had this incredible space hotel uh I think you're
03:36probably going to be late century really I think before that takes off certainly a decade or two
03:40so you say cost is seems like it is the main factor are there any other factors as well
03:48yes I mean there are quite a few I mean uh space uh travel is inherently very risky and
03:55dangerous uh there's all sorts of reasons for that uh you know current rockets will go up uh there's a
04:00few percent failure rate they blow up on the launch pad or they blow up in orbit or they something
04:05goes
04:05wrong and the solar panels don't deploy or whatever it is you know and satellites fail so current risks
04:11are probably around about a percent whereas if you look at airline travel you talk about 0.0001 percent
04:20problem with air travel is super super safe then you've kind of got regulatory hurdles you know
04:25certifications from governments about yes you're allowed to fly for public use etc then you've got
04:31you know if you're going out for periods of time you're not a trained astronaut then there are health
04:36risks that need to be carefully assessed uh and so you know so there's a lot of other factors beyond
04:41mere cost is practicalities as well that need to be overcome china has unveiled its plans for its
04:49space tourism sector do you think this extra competition to the likes of blue origin spacex and
04:55virgin galactic can accelerate the sector if you start to have competition uh then uh competition spurs
05:02innovation so innovation spurs development and you know turnaround speeds uh can improve you know
05:09you know the worst part of competition if you go to the extreme is you know war where you have
05:13warring nations and there and the competition there for survival is so extreme you get massive
05:17technological breakthroughs occurring but if you talk about commercial competition yes that does spur on
05:24growth it spurs on innovation and it spurs on new ways of doing things and that can actually
05:30accelerate the whole process and quentin how do you think the space tourism industry will look over the
05:35next decade uh not much different to it looks now probably there might be a few more flights
05:41uh if china emerges with its reusable rocket technologies are still behind uh what elon musk has
05:47done but they're really trying hard land space is a company that's looking at that other companies are
05:52too using similar kinds of ideas to what spacex has done catching things on towers uh and reusing once you
06:00can do that you're driving down costs very considerably for launching not just to take tourists up i would say
06:06but
06:06you know for satellites and for the commercial exploitation of low earth orbit we've also been
06:12looking at reusable rockets satellites and space ipos as part of our orbital economy series and if you'd
06:18like to find out more about all these topics scan this qr code for a link to the cgtn europe
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