In 1984, during the Reagan administration, the law that NASA established was amended to encourage private ventures beyond Earth: “The common good of the United States of America requires that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seek and encourage as much as possible, optimal commercial use of the space.”
For human spaceflight, early commercialization efforts sputtered. Plans to privatize NASA’s space shuttle operations were shelved after the loss of Challenger in 1986.
Instead, it was the Soviet space program in the fading years of communism that further led NASA to sell access to space. In 1990, Toyohiro Akiyama, a Japanese television reporter, flew a Soyuz rocket to the Soviet Mir space station. The trip was paid for by his employer, the Tokyo Broadcasting System.
At the same time, a group of British companies sponsored a competition to send the first British citizen into space. The winner was Helen Sharman, a chemist. She visited Mir in 1991. At the end of the decade, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia leased Mir to MirCorp, a Russian-American commercial company.
An American, Jeffrey Manber, led MirCorp and he envisioned turning the space station into a hub for tourism and entertainment. NBC has commissioned a reality TV show to be produced by Mark Burnett, creator of “Survivor” and “The Apprentice.”
“If you wanted to work with the capitalists in space in the 1990s, you worked with the Russians,” Mr Manber joked in a 2018 interview. “If you wanted to work with the socialists, you worked with NASA.”
MirCorp’s dreams were not realized as NASA insisted that Russia sink Mir and instead focus on the International Space Station.
To the dismay of NASA officials, Russia sold trips to the International Space Station. Dennis Tito, an American entrepreneur, was the first Russian-hosted tourist at the station in 2001. But Russia stopped taking private travelers in 2009 when, with the approaching retirement of the space shuttles, NASA had to buy available seats on Russian rockets for its astronauts to get to and from the space station.
Now that SpaceX is able to carry American astronauts and NASA is no longer a paying customer, Russia has resumed selling rides to the space station. The most recent trips, in late 2021, have included a film-shooting Russian director and actress and a Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, and his assistant.
In recent years, NASA has opened up to the idea of space tourism. It hopes private companies can launch commercial bases into orbit to eventually replace the International Space Station. Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator during the Trump administration, often spoke of NASA being one of the many customers that would significantly reduce costs for NASA.
But for NASA to be one of many customers, there must be other customers. Eventually, other applications, such as pharmaceutical research or zero-gravity manufacturing, may finally come to fruition.
But for now, the most promising market is wealthy people who pay to visit the space themselves.
