Nah, nobody would pay anything to see something like this.
[Update a few minutes later]
It occurs to me that the first suborbital vehicles will be capable of reaching the lower ionosphere. How much extra would people pay to fly from high latitudes and see that up close and personal? Of course, there is another issue of whether or not it would be hazardous. I doubt it, but there might be some test flights required first. Perhaps even unmanned, by Masten et al. That’s the reason that they call it the “ignorosphere.” We haven’t really had the opportunity to study it that much. The new vehicles will provide us with one, finally.
Nope. Pic is nice, but I wouldn’t consider seeing it with my own eyes to be the experience of a lifetime. And I CERTAINLY wouldn’t consider spending a large sum of my life’s savings on it. /sarc
My first born and all of my ex-wife’s money.
Just curious, what would a trip to LEO — say, for one day (what’s that, about thirty orbits or so?) would be worth to you; i.e., what you would be willing to pay?
I think it would have to come down to ~$1k a seat for me to start getting really tempted. Not because the experience is small, but because my bank is. Until it gets into that range, I’ll have to settle for APOD and my 10″ dob, I guess.
How ’bout you?
One day would be about sixteen orbits. The marginal cost of additional days, though, would be small. At least if it were on a station of some sort (which would be the most comfortable).
About $60k.
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@Rand — You’re right, my bad. I was working from a period of 45min but now I remember that was only half an orbit; ie, the time they spend in darkness (or light).
“I think it would have to come down to ~$1k a seat for me to start getting really tempted.”
I don’t think you’ll ever be tempted. The Concorde was never that cheap, and a ride on Zero G is about 4 times as much.
An infinitely staged (an unachievable minimum) LOX/kerosene rocket would require about 25 pounds of propellant to put a pound in orbit. Right now, at an average of 15 cents/pound, that’s $3.75 per pound. The cost of operating a fully utilized cargo jet is always about 1/3 fuel, so LEO by rocket can never be less than about $11.25 a pound. But that has to include a vehicle to get up and back, with life support. Mercury weighed about 1,500 pounds, but say we could do twice as well as that. So 750 pounds of passenger and vehicle per passenger. The price tag is still $8,437.5
I don’t know if we’ll ever get anywhere close to that, but if it were $10k, I wouldn’t blink. We have a long, long way to go, however…
“Pic is nice, but I wouldn’t consider seeing it with my own eyes to be the experience of a lifetime.”
Here’s where the quality of the picture can make a difference. Before Dennis Tito went up, I had no interest at all in the idea of looking at the earth from space. Looking at it from an airplane is boring, and besides, there’s a lot cooler stuff to look at all around the earth.
Then I saw one of Dennis’s “vacation slide shows.” He’s an incredibly talented photographer, and the shots he came back with were simply stunning. I’ve never seen anything like them before or since. But he said that even these pictures didn’t do the view justice.
Yeah, it would be the experience of a lifetime.
What I would be willing to pay for the trip depends on what is at the destination, and my monthly income at the time. I would think that most people would pay as much for it as they currently do for a year’s vacations, which is usually more or less equivalent to their monthly income.
Well, based on the above comments, it looks like I’ll probably never fly in space. A ticket price of $1000 would be doable for me, but not $10,000.
At age 52, I’ve flown exactly twice on small single-engine planes, but never on a commercial airliner. And what with the the TSA and the anti-smoking regulations, I think I’d rather take a Greyhound bus. Flying in 2010 just doesn’t seem to have the cachet that it did in 1970.
But the rest of y’all, knock yerselves out. I’ll be watching and rooting for you.
$10,000 is the difference between differing levels of cars. I could see a fair number of people paying at that level. A couple years of cheap car with a little “I flew Virgin Galactic” or something would be a better talking point than the latest luxury model, imnsho.
Right now, due to financial circumstances, I’d have to say about $3k in current dollars. But at some point over the next twenty years, I’d say about $20k. Actual amount would depend on the experience offered.
Once I’d paid the up-front costs for the launch, I wouldn’t want to spend less than 5-6 days in orbit for my investment. Marginal cost of the additional days should be a small fraction of the total cost (pricing might be a different matter, of course), and the extra time guards some fun time after adapting if I win the severe SAS lottery (10% chance, on average).
Not particularly interested in just zooming to 100,000+ feet and back down…
Not particularly interested in just zooming to 100,000+ feet and back down…
I could go for that, since the no-smoking rule wouldn’t be much of an issue.
There’s a lot of other very enticing possibilities when you consider suborbital travel. Far beyond the up-and-down ride. It would have to become a quick-turnaround, highly responsive operation to take advantage of some of them, though. I’m not sure the policy on self-promotion here, but I wrote about a few possibilities a while back.
The value of a thing often depends on how much of it you already have, which includes money. The point of the tourism surveys is that for those people with a lot of it, trading it for a unique experience is not such a big deal. For us po’ folk, it is.
But if I had enough to devalue my money I’d certainly spend it for a week in orbit. Suborbital has less attraction for me, but for others it may have appeal.