When the space becomes a tourist destination!

           
              As introductory information, NASA was founded in 1958 as a response to the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial satellite the previous year (“what does NASA do?” NASA website). However, since then, it’s really contributed to a major part the whole world’s modern awareness and understanding of space and the solar system. So, overtime, especially after the end of the cold war in 1991, NASA has shifted some of its objectives from being mainly military competitive to become more environmental and scientific resulting lately in building the International Space Station (ISS) among with Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU. With accomplishing more than 130 successful flight missions, NASA declared that space-shuttle STS-135 (launched in July, 2011) was going to be the final mission of its space shuttle program. After that, NASA decided to allow commercial companies to work their way running space flights to ISS in order for the agency to focus its attention to the next future steps.

            NASA’s intention to let companies provide cargo and crew space flights leads me actually to a very important topic in my discussion since business got into the picture here. It is well known that business firms exist in order to collect profits. So, as they are invited to do so up there, space tourism becomes the hot topic then. The desire to travel in space is not recent and curiosity about travel to space has been ultimate for many “potential” costumers. In April 2001, the wealthy businessman Dennis Tito became the world’s first space tourist when he joined the Soyuz Mission to the ISS. And since then Space Adventure has taken 7 tourists on 8 trips to the ISS. Personally, I can see that space travel and especially tourism will become phenomenal in the next 25 yrs because all what it takes is “brave hearts and big bucks”!! However, there might be technical, environmental and medical considerations that could let space tourism down such as limited capacity of hosting travelers, probable and unexpected damages to the natural environment resulted from frequent flights in short periods of time and vision impacts.

            Commercially travelling to space and exploring the outside solar system is not the only possible dream that can easily come true! Using the space as a transport medium is what keeps all international space agencies quite busy for now and many years to come. We could imagine how using space to transport from point A to point B “on Earth” will impact all of the industry’s aspects in the future even the military ones.

When it comes to jobs and careers, in my point of view, either way, if commercially succeeds, is going to help this fresh spectrum of the industry to grow and thus facilitate more different vacancies. For sure, this business will defiantly require lots of human resources, either administrative (aviation managers) or operational (pilots and technicians) manpower. All of the above is what I call SPACE ECONOMY. Space economy in my opinion, is the complete set of elements that makes the future of space transportation, as an industry by its own, the dream that seems to come true very soon and hopefully it will bring with it an exceptional and rich experience for all industry’s parties too, not only travelers !!