The given essay will take into consideration the modern world trend called “space tourism”. The topic is based on the article entitled “Booking a Flight to Space, With Travel Insurance”, dated on January 3, 2012 and retrieved from the official website of “The New York Times”.
Usually nothing arises from nothing. A stimulus was needed for the birth and development of space tourism. The passed 20th century is marked by the unbelievable achievements unknown to the history of all human civilizations. The flight of the first person to space became the culmination of the scientific and technical revolution of the previous century.
The active exploitation of a space has begun since then. There were new spaceships; automatic devices started to the planets of a solar system; space stations orbited; a person flew to space and visited the Moon. In the process of the space industry development, more and more people of the most different trades - scientists, engineers, designers, test pilots - are involved in it. However, only few people had a unique opportunity to visit space.
At present, space technologies from the sphere of the experimental and scientific researches gradually passed into the area of the practical usage, and the moment when any person can not only use satellite communication services, but also fulfill real flights to space, without being a professional cosmonaut.
“Space tourism” is the term meaning the possibility provided to a person or to a group of people to travel to space for a certain payment. The scheme is simple: people pay money, pass the course of training, and fly to the space. It is not necessary to exchange money or to study foreign languages.
“Until now, space tourism has been limited to the ultra wealthy: just seven people have paid tens of millions of dollars each for a trip to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket” (Chang: 2012).
Space tourism is a flight or a series of flights of one or several persons to space which is paid from non-state means, on a commercial basis. Space is normally understood as the height exceeding 100 km above a sea level - the so-called Karman line, a conditional upper bound of the Earth’s atmosphere.
For naming people flying to space for their money in the entertaining purposes, the word combination “a space tourist” was chosen; however, it is an informal term. The official title is “a participant of space flight” (PSF), because they become the participants of the research experiments on the orbit, many of which are conducted for the first time. Gregory Olsen is also against the word “tourist”: being the scientist-physicist, he wants his flight to the space to be logical and he calls himself “the private space researcher”.
According to the forecasts of the experts and mass-media, in the next few years space tourism should pass from the entertainment accessible only to few rich people of the world to one of the most popular methods of pastime. The possibilities of space tourism are much wider than just orbital or …