By akademiotoelektronik, 04/01/2023

SpaceX: the beginning of an era of space tourism?

It is a historic flight that opens a new era in the conquest of space. This Wednesday, May 27, the first manned test flight of the SpaceX shuttle will depart for the International Space Station. It will be 4:33 p.m. (10:33 p.m. in France) in Cape Canaveral, Florida when the Crew Dragon spacecraft will be fired by the Falcon 9 launcher from SpaceX, Elon Musk's company. President Trump will be there to witness the flight of the two experienced, former NASA pilots.

This moment is important for America for two reasons. First, because it is the United States that is returning to space with this first launch, since 2011, of a manned flight on American soil, in an American shuttle, with an American rocket and an American launcher. In 2011 the space shuttles Endeavour, Atlantis and Discovery were retired without NASA having had the time and the means to develop a new generation. It was the somewhat sad end of the Space Shuttle program launched in the early 1970s, in the wake of the exploration of the Moon.

.At the time, President Barack Obama, noticing the delay in the face of the Russians, decided that it would be cheaper and faster to call on the private sector. In 2014, NASA therefore chose two separate shuttle programs, Boeing and SpaceX, which belongs to billionaire Elon Musk, and which is in a way a subcontractor of NASA. So it's a private flight that will leave later and that's the other historical aspect of this launch.

Commercial flights to space?

This commercial flight, where NASA will buy seats in the next few years from the carrier SpaceX means that we are really entering the era of space tourism and that the wealthiest will soon be able to afford a seat in this shuttle. If you win the Euromillions and you have a few tens of millions to spend, you can buy a ticket on SpaceX for an excursion to the international space station where you can stay for ten days.

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The first flight of this type could leave at the end of 2021. There will be also in 2022, shorter flights, without docking to the space station. Tickets sell for around $55 million. And that's just the beginning as President Donald Trump has set a goal for NASA to return to the Moon by 2024, with commercial flights in the medium term.

In the meantime, NASA has signed a contract with a company to add a module to the international space station for commercial activities. The idea is to then create a space station only reserved for wealthy visitors. None of this would be possible without this historic first flight, in a few hours, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

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