There have been paying guests at the International Space Station before, but those guests have not only paid quite a high price for their visit, their presence has always seemed a bit unwelcome. Now NASA has published an actual chart of room prices for visiting scientists, engineers, or plain old tourists. And the prices are actually reasonable. Bring your own snacks and don’t touch any of the gear, and the price could be as low as $11,250 a day, which is a lot less than some hotel rooms right here on Earth. Even if you eat NASA’s space chow and use the space spa (as in, pedal the exercise bike), the price is just $33,750 per day, plus $50 per gigabyte for sending home your space Instagrams. It’s reasonable enough that someone thinking of launching that mid-life crisis assault on Everest or grabbing a suite on a glitzy river cruise might think … higher.
But there’s a catch: The price does not include transportation.
NASA wants to ensure a “constant presence” in Earth orbit, and one way to do this is to get tourists to bunk down with the scientists now and then and send back snapshots. But right now NASA is spending almost $80 million a seat to secure lifts for American astronauts on Russian rockets. The previous seven space tourists also came courtesy of Russia, who sold their tickets at a rumored $20 million average. So even if room and board was gratis, there are still few people able to casually pay the ticket-to-ride.
That could change in the next year, as both SpaceX and ULA / Boeing are expected to begin rides to the ISS on American-made and launched spacecraft. It still won’t be cheap, but it should be much cheaper. Enough cheaper that a tourist company has already secured four launches. Not four seats—four complete launches.
Bigelow Aerospace, owned by Robert Bigelow who owns hotel chain Budget Suites of America and has been chasing the dream of a space hotel for decades, has signed a contract for four SpaceX Crew Dragon launches. The news release states that the flights would have “at least” four seats. In theory, the Dragon can handle seven. Even assuming that each one of those flights has to include at least one person who actually knows which of the craft’s sleek touchscreens to touch in an emergency, those four flights could potentially bring 24 tourists to space for an extended stay. And, since Bigelow is hiring the capsule for the full flight, the length of that flight might be almost as short or as long as the space tourists can handle.
As for space in space, there’s already an module built by Bigelow attached to the ISS. The BEAM was attached to the station in 2016 as a test of Bigelow’s inflatable technology. Based off patents from the cancelled “Transhab” station NASA designed in the 1990s, BEAM arrived at the station as a 7’ by 7’ box, and expanded into a 10’ by 13’ chamber. So far, the inflatable module has held up to micrometeorite impacts and displayed radiation protection that seems equal to that of the more rigid sections, but no one is living in it. The rarely visited module is described as being a kind of “padded room,” which might not be what Bigelow’s tourists have in mind for their $34k a day plus rocket ticket.
Exactly what a ticket to the station would cost at this point isn’t clear. SpaceX’s standard price for a Falcon 9 launch was $62 million in 2014. Split four ways, and that would come in at $16 million per seat for tourist-nauts. Now that SpaceX is routinely getting three or more flights out of the Block 5 Falcon 9, that price could come down, and Bigelow may have gotten a bulk rate, but that’s not a bad estimate of the real price of playing space tourist in 2020. However, that cost could go down dramatically when those Falcon 9s have flown a dozen, or two dozen, or five dozen times. And even more when Starship, New Glenn, and other next generation boosters are flying.
In the near future, Bigelow is hoping there’s another destination available where it doesn’t have to forward a per diem to NASA. The hotel magnate is hoping to build his own station that can handle six people at a time.