For 2027: Chinese start-up sells tickets for tourist space travel

Last week, the Chinese space start-up Deep Blue Aerospace sold two tickets for a twelve-minute suborbital tourist trip into space. Suborbital means that the flight only goes as far as the edge of space. This means that the aircraft does not escape the Earth's gravitational field and does not enter the Earth's orbit. Compared to rockets for orbital flights, aircraft for such suborbital flights do not need any significant heat protection, require less powerful propulsion and need to be less stable.

120,000 euros for twelve minutes in space

The tickets were sold over the virtual counter for 1,000,000 yuan (around 120,000 euros) each during a 20-minute livestream. Around three million viewers watched the sale, but the names of the buyers are not known. There will be another chance to buy more tickets next month.

This may sound like a lot of money, but it is only a fraction of the price of a flight on board the SpaceShipTwo spaceship operated by US provider Virgin Galactic. The tickets cost the equivalent of more than 450,000 euros. But it can be even more expensive: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin auctioned off the first tickets and even achieved the highest bid of 28 million dollars.

The short flight with Deep Blue Aerospace is scheduled to take off in 2027 at the earliest. The intended aircraft, the Nebula-1 rocket, is currently still under development. The last test run was only partially successful – the rocket crashed in the final phase with an explosion. The test was carried out at the company's own Deep Blue Aerospace Ejina Banner Spaceport in Mongolia.

Nevertheless, the start-up claims in a statement that its rocket will reach an altitude of at least 100 kilometers in the coming year and find its way back to the launchpad in one piece. 100 kilometers internationally defines the boundary to space, the so-called Kármán line. Another Chinese provider, CAS Space, has set itself the goal of carrying out the first tourist space trips in 2028.

(kst)