Space Tourism

Abstract

Narrowly defined, the word ``tourism'' means travel for recreation or instruction, often in organized groups. The tourism industry primarily provides the tourist with travel to the destination and thereafter provides accommodation usually in a commercial establishment that provides lodging, food, and other services to the public. Therefore tourism is essentially associated with the transport and hospitality industries, where the hotel business features as an important industry which caters to people traveling for business or pleasure. When these factors are translated into exigencies of a viable space tourism industry, many considerations emerge, particularly from an extra terrestrial perspective. The main issues are whether a commercially viable and sufficiently evolved space transportation program could be a reality in the near future and whether the infrastructure needed for establishing accommodation for a sustained tourism industry in the inhospitable terrain of outer space could be put into place. Some have suggested that space tourism is indeed a realistic goal in the near future particularly if a space program were calculated to create permanent settlements. The residents of such outposts would have to ``live off the land,'' obtaining necessities such as oxygen and water from the harsh environment of outer space. For example, it has been suggested that on the Moon, pioneers could obtain oxygen by heating lunar soil. In 1998 the Lunar Prospector discovered evidence of significant deposits of ice -- a valuable resource for settlers -- mixed with soil at the lunar poles. It is also known that on Mars, oxygen could be extracted from the atmosphere and water could come from buried deposits of ice.