Space  tourism involves traveLling recreational, leisure or business purposes and a number of startup companies have sprung up in recent years, such as Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace, all of them hoping to create a sub-orbital space travel industry. So far, the opportunities have remained limited and expensive, with only the Russian Space Agency providing transport to date. As an alternative term to “tourism”, some organisations such as the  Commercial Spaceflight Federation use the term “personal spaceflight”, while the Citizens in Space project uses the term “Citizen Space Exploration”. As of September 2012, multiple companies are offering sales of orbital and sub-orbital flights, with varying durations and creature comforts.

At the end of the 1990s, Mir Corp, a private venture that was by then in charge of the space station, began seeking potential tourists to visit Mir in order to offset some of its maintenance costs. Dennis Tito, an American businessman and former JPL scientist, became their first candidate. When the decision to de-orbit Mir was made, Tito managed to switch his trip to the International Space Station through a deal between Mir Corp and the USA-based Space Adventures Ltd, despite strong opposition from senior figures at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; from the beginning of the ISS expeditions, Nasa stated it wasn’t interested in space guests. 

Nonetheless, Tito visited the ISS on 28 April 2001 and stayed for seven days, becoming the first “fee-paying” space tourist. He was followed in 2002 by South African computer millionaire Mark Shuttleworth and then came Gregory Olsen in 2005, who was trained as a scientist and whose company produced specialist high-sensitivity cameras. Olsen planned to use his time on the ISS to conduct a number of experiments, in part to test his company&’s products. He had planned an earlier flight, but had to cancel for health reasons.

Space Adventures remains the only company to have sent paying passengers to space. A 2010 study funded by Nasa and the Aerospace Corporation and published in  Geophysical Research Letters raised concerns that the growing commercial spaceflight industry could accelerate global warming. It simulated the impact of 1,000 sub-orbital launches of hybrid rockets from a single location, calculating that this would release a total of 600 tonnes of black carbon into the stratosphere. It found that the resultant layer of soot particles remained relatively localised, with only 20 per cent of the carbon straying into the southern hemisphere, thus creating a strong hemispherical asymmetry. 

This imbalance would cause the temperature to decrease by about 0.4 ° Celsius in the tropics and subtropics, whereas, interestingly, the temperature at the poles would increase by between 0.2° and one degree Celsius. It wasn’t only about the temperature shifting; these effects would also affect the ozone layer, with the tropics losing up to 1.7 per cent of ozone cover, and the Polar regions gaining five to six per cent.

The researchers cautioned that these results should not be taken as “a precise forecast of the climate response to a specific launch rate of a specific rocket type”, but as a demonstration of the sensitivity of the atmosphere to the largescale disruption that commercial space tourism could bring.

A myriad of legal and regulatory aspects of public space travel and tourism must be resolved before viable largescale businesses can emerge. This is especially true of those public agencies with the responsibility to regulate in the interest of public safety. This includes identification of public policies and/or laws that exist or must be enacted to enable business formation, licensing, certification and approval processes for both passengers and vehicles, clearance and over-flight considerations, and environmental and safety issues, including atmospheric pollution, solar radiation (flares) and orbital debris.

National and international regulatory issues will affect general public space travel and tourism significantly. It will be crucial to assure both the authorities and the general public that this new business is considered to be safe by reasonable standards and acceptable by those who would venture on space trips. For example, it might be reasonable to expect that the earliest services will be safe by the standards of sky-diving, but not by the standards of today&’s commercial aviation; recall that the latter required improvement over decades to reach its present high level. Whatever standards are applied, it will be important to streamline regulatory processes and to establish uniformity in those standards and their application.

In seriously addressing the possibility of our private sector providing space travel and tourism systems and services to the general public we should be able to appreciate that what is being discussed here is nothing less than a fundamental challenge to our views of, and participation in extra-earth activities. It is not unreasonable to characterise this challenge as politically, socially and economically revolutionary. We now see the opportunity of opening up space to the general public — a “sea change” in our half-century sense that people in space would continue to be very few in number, would be limited to highly trained professionals who, at personal physical risk, would conduct mostly taxpayer-supported scientific and technical activities there under government purview. 

Now the dream of very many of us during the Apollo era that we could someday take a trip to space for our own personal reasons is finally approaching realisation. But bringing this about will require fundamental changes in the way that scientists, engineers, system-service operators, government officials, investment houses, business people, industry leaders and entrepreneurs go about creating the required infrastructure and offering  space-related services.

The writer is a fourth-year student with law as a special subject at the College of Legal Studies, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, and can be contacted at sbhmsikdar@gmail.com