Introduction:
Space tourism has become a billion-dollar industry, but how many space tourists are there? It seems like the numbers are changing every month or so, but it's difficult to estimate how many people have been to space.
Space is one of the things that everyone dreams of exploring. But, the fact is, we're still a long way away from this dream becoming reality. Some people argue that it's because there's no demand – but I strongly disagree with them.
How many space tourists are there?
There are many space tourists, but the number is not known. It's hard to know how many people have paid for a trip into space and then returned. It's not just the number of people who have actually gone into space, but also those who have been there and come back.
There are some estimates that show that about 100 people have been in space, but these only include astronauts and cosmonauts. There are no estimates of how many tourists have gone into space or come back from it.
There are currently three space tourists who have paid for their flights:
Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson, whose total cost was around $250,000;
Billionaire Elon Musk, who 2018 paid $20 million for his trip to the International Space Station; and
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has paid $250 million for his Blue Origin space tourism company.
There are approximately 1,000 space tourists and they plan on traveling to the International Space Station.
The first people who went up in space were Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard, who went up in a capsule called "Freedom 7".
Then we had the Apollo missions, which were all manned by Americans. The Russians had sent dogs into space before, but only one human: Valeri Leonov (the man who walked on the Moon).
In 1973 there was a giant crisis called Skylab - because it was too expensive to keep going up there. But then in 1979 when I was five years old we went up again to do something about it: we sent up a satellite called Skylab 3, which was actually just an empty space station with solar panels and cameras on board so we could see what was happening down below.
There are three main ways to become a space tourist:
1. The first is to purchase a ticket to go into space, which is called a "tourist flight." There are many companies that offer this as well as government agencies such as NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency.
2. The second is to travel with a group through an official agency like Apollo 11 or Virgin Galactic, where you'll be taught how to fly before and after your trip into space.
3. And the third option is for individuals who want to create their own adventure into space by going on their own private journey.
Conclusion:
Finding statistics on the number of space tourists is surprisingly difficult. With so many different agencies organizing space travel, and with each organization tracking tourists from their own perspective, it's hard to know exactly how many paying passengers have been taken into space.