Imagine! You’re at an airport terminal waiting in line to buy a ticket. You get to the counter, and you order a ticket to a space station, the moon or even Mars. It sounds too good to be true, but we might be closer than you think to commercial space travel.
There has been a huge surge of interest in commercial space travel in recent years. Several companies – such as Elon Musk’s Space X, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic – have accepted the challenge of making space travel as easy and affordable as buying a plane ticket. Bold TV’s host Philip Michael sat down with Tim Chrisman to talk about commercial space travel’s trajectory.
How close is commercial space travel?
Chrisman is very confident that space tourism will be readily available by the end of this year. However, like all new things, only the wealthy will be able to afford these flights until it becomes more established. During an interview with Joe Rogan, Elon musk predicted that commercial space flights would be obtainable by 2023. That’s incredibly close.
Unexpected disassembly
But some people are wondering, “Well, in recent weeks and months, Space X’s Starship keeps blowing up. How do we know it will be safe?” The answer is simple: Because it keeps blowing up, we know that it eventually will be safe enough. Elon Musk expects his ships to explode. “It’s weird if it doesn’t explode during these tests,” he said. When testing out a rocket, you will get much more data when it explodes than if the rocket is slightly successful. Musk calls this unexpected disassembly.
His Falcon 9 rockets also used to explode all the time during the first tests 10-15 years ago. Musk has a realistic, software developer mentality: There will be problems, so let’s stress-test these rockets and see what happens. The rockets that are blowing up now will be the ones we use in the future!