3 billionaires' dreams of space tourism are more than flights of fancy, planetary experts say

It might be several years before most Canadians can afford a ticket to outer space, but some planetary experts say the upcoming space launches led by billionaires could bring a new era of space exploration.

On Sunday,Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Bransonwillbecome the first of three billionaires to get into space if the launch from New Mexico is successful.

Nine days later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin is planning tolaunch into space from Texas, with Tesla founder Elon Musk's SpaceXlaunch scheduled forlater this year.

It's the beginning of what Kate Howells Canadian space policy adviser for the Planetary Society, the world's largest non-profit space organization saysis the next era of space tourism.

And if trips to space become more affordable and more frequent, Howells and others say, researchers at universities andprivate companies could have a quicker way to travel to space.

"Previously, the only way for tourists to go to space was to fly to the International Space Station. And that hasn't happened for many years," she said.

"This istaking space tourism to thenext level, opening up a more affordable still not very affordable but a more affordable way for tourists to go into space."

Ticket prices to get aboard aren't cheap, with someone paying $28 millionUS in an auction for a seat on Bezos'sfirst flight to suborbital space.

If successful in their launches, Virgin Galactic's and Blue Origin'scrafts will be near or within the edge of space. The Fdration Aronautique Internationale, the world governing body for air sports, defines the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space as 100 kilometres above Earth's mean sea level, the so-called Krmn Line.

But the crafts will haveenough height to give both crews a chance to view the Earth's curvature against the blackness of space whileexperiencingweightlessness for just a few minutes.

"That's the part of the experience that you're paying for," said Marc Boucher, founder and editor-in-chief of SpaceQMedia Inc., an online Canadian space news companybased in London, Ont.

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New space race, new research

This year's space race is much different than the race to the moon in the 1960s. Themodern race is defined primarilyby competition and dreams to commercialize space flight, said Sara Mazrouei, a planetary scientist and an educational developer at Ryerson University in Toronto.

But planetary experts like Mazrouei and Howells said this space race can also bring some benefitsto Earth.

If trips to space become more accessible, research insuborbital space could happen more often and that could lead to exciting discoveries.

"The last space race that we had to get to the moon gave us the technology for our running shoes, for our foam mattresses, for our bulletproof vests," Mazrouei said.

"I'm really hopeful that once we move beyond this initial set of billionaires getting to space, there will be room for other experiments and for more involvement."

Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX all have calls out on their websites for what is known as payloads, referring to elements on spacecraft dedicated to producing mission data and then relaying that data back to Earth, according to the European Space Agency.

Boucher said the potential research opportunities are exciting.

"We have to understand that there's a lot of research that's going on in space right now. A lot of that is happening on the International Space Station, but it's really expensive," he said.

"So these flights of opportunities on these new suborbital vehicles will offer a much cheaper cost to do some of this research."

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