2021 Was the Year Space Tourism Opened Up. But for Whom?

 

SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic finally made commercial spaceflight possible. Now there are questions about the purpose of these exclusive trips.

 

IN THE EARLY years of this century, executives at Virgin Galactic, founded by the irreverent Richard Branson, predicted that commercial flights to space for paying passengers were only a couple of years away. That turned out to be far too ambitious. Disaster struck the company twice in the next decade: In 2007 an explosion during pre-launch tests of SpaceShipTwo’s rocket systems killed three people. Then in 2014, a pilot was killed during a test flight when the space plane crashed in the Mojave desert.

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