DNA Explainer: Want to become ‘private astronaut’ and try your hands on space travel, here’s your chance – DNA India

Space tourism is human space travel for recreational, leisure, or business purposes. It provides an opportunity for non-astronauts to go to space.

Are you interested in travelling to space? Do outer space and its mysteries entice you? Then here's your golden chance to see the outer world from a very close distance. But then for this, you have to be prepared to shell outa hefty amount from your pocket. Space tourism is human space travel forrecreational, leisure, or business purposes.There are different types of space tourism, including orbital, suborbital, and lunar space tourism.The whole idea behind this is that those who are not astronauts but want to go to space for non-scientific purposes can get an opportunity to do so.

So to get a seat aboard one of Virgin Galactic's upcoming spaceflights you have to pay an enormous sum of USD450,000. However, it is still less than what a winning bidder paid for in June to fly with Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos inhis rocket ship, New Shepard. Through a winning bid of USD28 million, the bidder booked a seat for himself in therocket ship.Over 7,600 people had registered from 159 countries to bid for this seat. However, it did not go down too well with the common public and more than 50,000 people signed online petitions urging Bezos to not return to Earth after he took his space flight on July 20.

Earlier, Richard Branson, the billionaire owner of Virgin Galactic, himself reached the edge of space on July 11 along with three employees from his company who also boarded SpaceShipTwo. Apart from Virgin Galactic, companies including Virgin Atlantic, SpaceX, XCOR Aerospace, Blue Origin and Armadillo Aerospace are working on providing space tourism services to people.

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DNA Explainer: Want to become 'private astronaut' and try your hands on space travel, here's your chance - DNA India