(Bloomberg) — Ron Rosano is one of the world’s most dedicated space tourists.
A 65-year-old property manager from San Francisco, he took a short trip aboard a Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. spacecraft in 2023 and until recently hoped to fly more than 60 miles above Earth in one of the New Shepard rockets from Blue Origin LLC, founded by Jeff Bezos.
Rosano, however, had to change his plans after a surprise decision by Blue Origin, in January, to suspend tourist flights for at least two years. Rosano is disappointed. “I had imagined a very big scenario of what this could mean for me,” he said. “Seeing the Earth from that perspective: it’s humbling. It’s transformative.”
Companies like Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites LLC envisioned a booming market for space tourism when, in the early 2000s, they promised to launch humans into suborbital space. Space tourism will become a “multibillion-dollar industry,” said Eric Anderson, co-founder of space exploration company Space Adventures Inc., in a 2003 issue of Space Times magazine.
Today, however, the sector is in crisis. In addition to the pause in Blue Origin flights, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has not flown since June 2024, while it works on the development of its new ship, Delta.
Virgin Galactic will release fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results on March 30. The company’s share price has fallen more than 98% since its debut in October 2019, via a merger with a company already listed on the stock exchange.
“Tourism hasn’t really come to fruition as a market. We’ve certainly had a number of tourist-sponsored missions, but they’ve been limited, and we haven’t seen a recurring demand for this type of flight,” said Dana Weigel, International Space Station program manager at NASA, in a presentation in Washington on March 24.
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Problems include limited demand and technologies that take years to scale, even with a narrow target market, said Eric Zhu, aerospace and defense analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
“The fundamental problem is scale and cost,” he said. “The sector is targeting an extremely narrow slice of ultra-high net worth individuals, but even this group does not generate repeat business.”
On hold
Virgin Galactic has sent 31 passengers into space, and Blue Origin has sent 98 (six of them have flown twice), including an all-female crew that flew last year with Katy Perry, CBS News anchor Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, wife of Jeff Bezos. That flight sparked backlash online after Perry sang during the flight and kissed the ground after returning to Earth.
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The first space tourist, Dennis Tito, flew in a Soyuz spacecraft in 2001. Russian rockets have carried nine commercial passengers into space, but none since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Roscosmos, Russia’s equivalent of NASA, wants to resume tourist flights to a proposed Russian space station, but the “stigma” of Perry’s trip has not yet been overcome, said Robert English, director of Central European studies at the University of Southern California.
The flight “was an obvious target for critics,” he said, “because you kiss the Earth after surviving a long, harrowing, heroic journey — not after a brief billionaire bus ride.”
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Virgin Galactic expects to launch the first test flight of its Delta spacecraft by the end of 2026.
Responding to a request for comment, the company preferred not to disclose ticket prices or other information before announcing the results. Previously, Virgin Galactic charged around $600,000 for seats on the new ship.
Blue Origin’s prices are not public, but Craig Curran, president of travel agency group DePrez Group of Travel Companies in Rochester, New York, estimates the price at approximately $1.5 million to $2 million per ticket.
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“Today there really isn’t a market for suborbital space tourism,” he said. “In terms of actually having a product, we are waiting for Virgin Galactic to become operational.”
Branson says he wants to fill the space left by Blue Origin.
“The space launch later this year is going to be really important, especially now that Blue Origin appears to have fallen out of the picture in sending people to space,” Branson said March 4 via livestream during a space conference in London.
Blue Origin does not claim that it has ended space tourism.
“I think we’ll probably get back into this business, but right now it makes more sense to focus on the Moon,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said Feb. 17 at the Defense Tech Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida.
When contacted, Blue Origin sent a press release about the pause of the New Shepard program.
Filling the Gap
Chinese companies have announced plans to invest in space tourism. Beijing Interstellor Human Spaceflight Technology Co. wants to take tourists to space in 2028 for a price of 3 million yuan (about US$430,000). Rocket manufacturer and flight services provider CAS Space Technology Co. plans to carry out manned tourist flights into space by 2029, according to the company itself.
“They’re signaling ‘let’s compete,’” said Rachel Fu, a professor in the department of tourism, hospitality and event management at the University of Florida.
The sector could still experience a recovery if Elon Musk’s SpaceX is successful with Starship, its huge reusable rocket currently under development. Starship could reduce the cost of putting a person into orbit by 90%, according to Fu.
“Space tourism was never intended to remain a niche luxury product,” she said. “The small initial group of customers serves as a financial and technological bridge to a long-term goal: reducing the cost of access to space and expanding commercial activity beyond Earth.”
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