You Only Have to Be Rich, Not Healthy, to Fly in Space

The so-called “space billionaires”—Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk—imagine a day when people will live and work in space, gradually transforming humanity into a multi-planet species. The next step in that direction is the development of a space tourism industry, and that’s about to become a reality.

The rich will go first, of course, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to be astronauts—if only for a few minutes. These extreme-tourism-style flights by Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are seen as a precursor to an era when blasting to and from space will be considered as routine as flying from New York to Chicago. The preparation needed to make these civilian rides work is also crucial for the kind of point-to-point hypersonic flights that Musk and others have envisioned as a way to shrink travel times across the Earth.