Beijing may soon deliver its first paying passengers to the edge of space as early as 2025The country’s top rocket scientist has said that tickets are likely to cost between 2 million and 3 million yuan ($286,400 to $429,600).
Commercial space tourism will be “in full swing” by 2027, according to Yang Yiqiang, who founded a government-backed company to research the commercial uses of rockets. He has also been the CEO of the Long March 11 rocket project in 2018.
As Yang explained in an interview with the Global Times, the commercial space sector in China has shifted from an era 1.0 characterized by fundamental manufacturing and research and development (R&D) to an era 2.0.
The sector is expected to reach the level of development of the United States in ten years, China Daily had previously reported that seven visitors could fly at an altitude of more than 100 kilometers at a time.
Yang said suborbital travel was more technologically advanced and more suitable for most people than other forms of space travel. The SCMP said passengers will experience a brief period of weightlessness during the 10-minute journey that will lift them above the Karmann Line, the line that separates Earth’s atmosphere from space, the SCMP said.
Last year, CAS Space said it is developing a reusable single-stage rocket and spacecraft that will enable the spacecraft., After the rocket reaches the Karman line, the spacecraft will detach and continue to travel through the air due to inertia.
Although the spacecraft would return with its parachute, the rocket would re-enter the atmosphere and make a soft landing using only its engines.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences is a part of CAS Space, which was established in 2018. It is one of the leading Chinese start-up commercial launch companies.
The company was reported to have signed a cooperation agreement in July with China Tourism Group, the country’s largest state-owned travel company, to promote commercial space technologies and develop a new space economy, including giant tourism. It was promised to work together.
Starting next year, a series of unmanned test flights will be launched before carrying paying passengers. As of 2021, China had 370 space-related business ventures, rapidly catching up with the United States in the region.,
Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic previously announced that it would begin offering space flights for $450,000 per ticket. Last year, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched four private passengers into orbit, making it the first space flight without trained astronauts.
SpaceX said the spacecraft with a civilian crew orbited Earth for three days at a distance of about 575 kilometers, compared to the space station’s current orbits. In August, Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin, which provides spaceflight services, completed its sixth manned spaceflight mission.
China’s growing footprint
The announcement comes as major economies are in a fierce race for market share in the growing space industry.
On September 9, the Vice President of the United States of America, Kamala Harris, urged agencies to present a plan to approve and supervise “commercial space activities” over the next six months to keep the country at the forefront of the industry. China is also trying to move forward in this sector at a good pace.
The market size of China’s commercial space industry showed a compound annual growth rate of 22.09% between 2015 and 2020 as a result of a wide range of intellectual property rights held by the country, systems to nurture talent, and central government support.
The scope of national and commercial space companies is quite limited. Only a few companies’ rocket and satellite businesses are profitable, meaning they are still in the “accumulation” phase, Yang said.
The United States began supporting the commercialization of the space industry in the 1980s, and when SpaceX was founded in 2002The sector had largely reached maturity.
By comparison, China began actively promoting private companies to expand the commercial space industry in 2015. However, after seven years of rapid expansion in a wide range of areas such as rocket launch, satellite development, this sector has started to take shape. and ground equipment, operation of satellites and application of satellites.
