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Space Tourism- A New Era of Outdoor Exploration
Space tourism is paving the way for lunar mountaineering, martian mountain biking, and hiking terraformed trails. Here are the companies leading us to the high frontier.
As an outdoor enthusiast, you’ve probably visited some popular outdoor tourist locations. Maybe you’ve hiked along Havasupia Falls, mountain biked Porcupine Rim Trail in Moab, or climbed some of the big walls at Yosemite. These are world-class outdoor destinations and they’re pretty great, but imagine doing those same activities IN OUTER SPACE.
One day we might have famous mountain biking trails on Mars, big walls to climb on the moon, and terraformed hiking trails on other planets. Space tourism is blossoming, and if it turns out to be anything like tourism on Earth, then a huge part of space tourism will be centered around the outdoors.
Lunar mountaineering might sound far-fetched, but there are a few companies who are hitting major milestones and claiming to be less than year away from taking their first paying customers to outer space. Here are some companies leading the space race and their timelines to take us to the next era of exploration:
SpaceX
Founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX was created to enable humans to colonize other planets.
The company builds and launches rockets that are not only designed for interplanetary travel, but also for reusability. Currently, SpaceX has two rockets (Falcon 9and Falcon Heavy) and a free-flying spacecraft (Dragon) in their fleet. By 2022, SpaceX hopes to send their first cargo mission to Mars.
Though originally claiming that they would fly two paying customers on a weeklong journey around the moon before the end of 2018, Musk recently announcedthat the timetable is looking more likely to be mid 2019 or later.
