PR-Summary:

Extensive travel by air, sea, and land for pleasure and business is commonplace in modern life. In contrast, travel in space is only available, essentially, to a small number of highly trained government astronauts, and the public’s perception is that it cannot be otherwise. In fact, space tourism has already started evolving through a number of stages beginning with ground theme parks, space camps, zero gravity flights, and Soyuz flights to the International Space Station as realized by Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth. Progress to suborbital trips with a brief experience of weightlessness will probably follow as a natural further development. This study focuses on those near term suborbital trips, examining suborbital vehicles that are in the development stage and matching their capabilities.
 
 

Author Biography:

Robert A. Goehlich was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1975. Robert studied Aerospace Engineering at the Technical University Berlin from 1996 to 2000 and is currently a doctoral candidate. The author’s investigations are focused on cost engineering for reusable space transportation systems and strategies to realize space tourism.

In 1999, he worked at the Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, investigating pollutant emission models for computer-aided preliminary aircraft design. In 2000, Robert conducted his master's thesis addressing the feasibility of space tourism at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. At the National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan, he examined the economical performance of a Reusable Launch Vehicle concept, in 2001. He stayed for 3 months in 2002 at Astrium/EADS, Kourou Spaceport, French Guiana to consider a program proposal for a tourist reusable launch fleet operated from Kourou Spaceport.