Space tourism

Human spaceflight undertaken primarily for recreation or leisure, typically through privately operated commercial services. It includes suborbital flights, orbital stays, and private missions to space stations.

Suborbital spaceflight: A spaceflight that reaches space but does not complete an orbit around Earth. Short tourist flights cross the edge of space and return without entering orbit.
Blue Origin NS-16: Blue Origin's first crewed New Shepard flight, which carried four passengers on a suborbital trip in 2021. The flight marked the company's first paying-customer-era passenger mission, alongside founder Jeff Bezos.
Commercial spaceflight: Spaceflight services developed or operated by private companies for paying customers or other commercial purposes. Space tourism is one customer-facing branch of the broader commercial space sector.
Outer Space Treaty: A 1967 international treaty establishing basic rules for activities in outer space. Its principles apply to private tourist missions as well as government spaceflight.
Orbital spaceflight: Spaceflight in which a vehicle follows an orbit around a celestial body. Orbital tourism requires far more energy and supports longer stays than brief suborbital trips.
Inspiration4: A 2021 all-civilian orbital mission operated by SpaceX for Jared Isaacman. Its privately funded crew orbited Earth for three days without a professional astronaut aboard.
Space tourism ethics: Debates about fairness, environmental costs, labor, and responsibility in commercial human spaceflight. High prices and resource use raise questions about who benefits from tourist access to space.
Commercial Crew Program: A NASA program that funded U.S. companies to transport crews to low Earth orbit. Its public-private model helped establish commercial crewed transport used by private missions.
Reusable launch system: A launch system designed to recover and fly again some or all of its hardware. Reusing boosters can lower the cost of the launches that carry paying passengers.
Axiom Mission 1: A 2022 private crewed mission to the International Space Station operated by Axiom Space and SpaceX. It demonstrated a commercial route from private passenger flight to an orbital-station visit.

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