Beijing might soon transport its first paying travelers to the edge of space, as early as 2025with tickets likely to cost 2 million to 3 million yuan ($286,400 to $429,600), the country’s top rocket scientist has said.
The spacial tourism Commercial use will be in “full swing” by 2027, according to Yang Yiqiang, who founded a government-backed company to research the commercial use of rockets. He has also been CEO of the Long March 11 rocket project in 2018.
The commercial space sector in China has moved from an era 1.0 characterized by fundamental manufacturing and research and development (R&D) to an era 2.0 driven by applications and market forces, Yang explained in an interview with the Global Times. .
The sector is expected to reach the level of development of USA in ten years. China Daily had previously reported that up to seven visitors might fly at a time at a height of more than 100 kilometers.
Yang said suborbital travel was more technically developed and more suitable for most people compared to other forms of space travel. Passengers will experience a brief period of weightlessness during the 10-minute journey that will take them above the Kármán line, the line that separates Earth’s atmosphere from space, SCMP said.
Last year, CAS Space said it was developing a reusable single-stage rocket and spacecraft that would enable spaceflight.. The spacecraft would detach once the rocket reached the Kármán line and continue to travel through the air due to inertia.
Although the spacecraft would return with its parachute, the rocket would reenter the atmosphere and make a soft landing using only its engines.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences owns a part of CAS Space, which was established in 2018. It is one of the leading Chinese start-up commercial launch companies.
The company was reported to have signed a collaboration agreement with the China Tourism Group, the nation’s largest state-owned travel company, in July, pledging to work together to promote commercial space technologies and develop a new space economy, including the spacial tourism.
Starting next year, a series of unmanned test flights will be carried out before carrying paying passengers. By 2021, China had 370 space-related business enterprises, quickly catching up with the United States in this domain..
Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic previously announced that it would start offering space flights for $450,000 a ticket. Last year, SpaceXof Elon Muskput four private passengers into orbit, becoming the first spaceflight without trained astronauts.
SpaceX stated that the spacecraft with a civilian crew orbited the Earth for three days at regarding 575 kilometers, higher than the space station’s existing orbits. In August, Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin, which provides spaceflight services, completed its sixth human spaceflight mission.
China’s growing footprint
The announcement came as major economies are engaged in a vigorous race for market share in the growing space industry.
On September 9, the US Vice President, Kamala Harris, urged agencies to present plans to approve and supervise “commercial space activities” in the next six months, in order to keep the country at the forefront of the industry. China is also striving to advance in this sector at a good pace.
The market size of China’s commercial space industry showed a compound annual growth rate of 22.09% between 2015 and 2020 as a result of a wide range of intellectual property rights held by the country, a system to nurture talent and the support of the central government.
The scope of national and commercial space companies is quite limited. Only a few companies’ rocket and satellite businesses are profitable, which means they are still in the “accumulation” stage, Yang said.
The United States began supporting the commercialization of the space industry in the 1980s, and when SpaceX was founded in 2002the sector had largely reached maturity.
By comparison, China began actively promoting private companies to expand the commercial space industry in 2015. However, the sector has already begun to take shape following seven years of rapid expansion in a wide range of areas, such as rocket launches, the development of satellites and ground equipment, the operation of satellites and the application of satellites.