NASA is Opening International Space Station to Tourists

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NASA is set to make the ISS available to tourists and other business ventures. In an announcement made last week, NASA Chief Financial Officer Jeff DeWitt said that they are making the space station more available than ever before.

Before we talk about the prices involved if you would one day want to fulfill your childhood dream and be an astronaut for a while, it’s also worth mentioning that you can’t simply buy a ticket and be at the gate the next day. You will first need to undergo some training as well as medical exams, and only if you fit the requirements, which will probably be fairly difficult, will you then be able to participate in one of these missions.

Now let’s talk about what you really want to know. New York Times reported that this can cost you around $35,000 per night. Head over to a sports betting website and maybe you will get lucky and book a night at the ISS hotel. If we break that price down further, that will be $22,500 for access to supplies, $11,250 for essentials like water, oxygen, and the toilet. And by the way, these are going to be the costs for one night. If you plan on spending 30 days there, you better have $1,000,000 saved up. With four seats available for each mission, NASA is set to make $4,000,000 per mission.

However, for now, there will only be two of those per year. NASA has already sent some of their professional astronauts on a 30-day trip to the ISS to carry out approved commercial activities. A trip like this should be available to the public sometime in 2020.

Many companies already use the ISS for conducting research and commercial development, but the new effort will broaden the scope even further, including activities such as space tourism. It will also open the door for businesses to indulge in various activities such as developing or promoting a product, and even shooting video ads in space! If the bid companies decide that this would be good for their business, we don’t even want to think about how much money NASA will be able to make for providing this.

NASA won’t be directly involved in handling space tourists, as commercial solutions such as SpaceX and Boeing will be responsible for that. They will also be responsible for the tests and certifications needed for tourists to be able to attend such a mission.

The main reason NASA is doing this is because they are lacking funds to be able to make the Moon in 2024. To be more precise, this mission was planned to send the first woman on the Moon a lot earlier, but due to insufficient funds and resources, it was delayed until 2024. If everything goes to plan, NASA is set to make a whole lot of money from the ISS project, making its 2024 Moon landing mission very likely.

The private ISS flights are set to start as early as 2020, with two month-long missions.