It emerged this week that SpaceX has from this year to late 2019 at the earliest for two extremely high-paying, but unnamed, passengers.
So what to make of Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson鈥檚 latest declaration, aboard SpaceShipTwo, the company鈥檚 eight-seat suborbital spaceplane.
When it comes to suborbital ventures, we have heard such predictions before: Virgin Galactic was originally slated to begin ferrying deep-pocketed tourists to space by 2008. This was meant to be a prelude to space travel for the many.
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Such talk blossomed after the awarding of the $10 million Ansari X-Prize to Virgin Galactic鈥檚 spaceship design partner, Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, in 2004. It became the first commercial venture to put an astronaut into suborbital space twice, just five days apart, using the same vehicle, the single-seat SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipTwo is a larger version of this craft.
Prize boost
But that success hasn鈥檛 led to the kind of fast-paced commercialisation that followed similar prizes offered in the early days of aviation.
For instance, when Charles Lindbergh scooped the $25,000 Orteig prize after crossing the Atlantic in his single-engine monoplane Spirit of St Louis in May 1927, it wasn鈥檛 only a global news sensation. The knock-on effect on commercial aviation was rapid and electrifying.
Lindbergh鈥檚 flight showed that aircraft could be safe 鈥� and that engines on long-haul journeys could go the distance. As a result, the beginnings of the mass transit civil aviation system we know today quickly began to take shape, with air passenger numbers in the US shooting up 30-fold by 1929.
That hasn鈥檛 been repeated with space flight: no civilian has yet taken a paid trip into suborbital space to experience microgravity and an astonishing view of Earth. A fatal crash during testing of the first prototype of SpaceShipTwo, in 2014, also pushed the first flights back.
Expensive venture
Space is a very different venture from aviation and public reservations aren鈥檛 so easy to allay. Escaping Earth鈥檚 gravity is an energetic activity, full of risk. It is also eye-wateringly expensive.
Branson told the BBC that Virgin Galactic is now in a 鈥渘eck and neck鈥� race with , the nascent space tourism business run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to be first to get passengers into suborbital space. Blue Origin is in flight tests of its rocket and capsule, New Shepard, and has already been putting into suborbit, alongside a human-size dummy (called Mannequin Skywalker). All this suggests some kind of breakthrough is imminent.
Civilian spaceflight is still waiting for its Lindbergh moment, a feat that, at a stroke, engenders such public confidence in the reliability and safety of commercial rocketry that space tourism takes off bigtime. Just don鈥檛 bet too much on it happening any time soon.
