$549,000 for a ticket to space? Chinese firms play catch-up in space tourism

BEIJING – On Jan 22, Chinese space start-up InterstellOr created a buzz on Chinese social media when it announced plans to send tourists to suborbital space in 2028 – at a cost of 3 million yuan (S$548,760) a ticket.

The flight is expected to last about 2.5 hours and reach the Karman line, 100km from Earth, that defines where space begins.

More than 20 people have reportedly signed up for the potentially historic mission, including a power grid engineering expert, Mr Li Licheng; the chief marketing officer of Shanghai-based robotics firm AgiBot Qiu Heng; and actor Huang Jingyu.

InterstellOr is the second Chinese company to announce a timeline for manned missions, joining the competition to send the first paying Chinese citizens to space.

In October 2024, Jiangsu Deep Blue Aerospace said it had sold two tickets at 1.5 million yuan each for a suborbital rocket ride scheduled for 2027.

Excitement is growing in China over its commercial space sector,

which allows wealthy private citizens, with little to no professional astronaut training, to experience rare views of the Earth and brief weightlessness.

There has been recent national push to catch up with the United States, as the geopolitical rivals jockey over technological leadership and international prestige.

The US space tourism industry is far more mature,

with launches by SpaceX now taking place on a regular basis,

while Blue Origin – backed by Amazon’s multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos – has flown more than 90 people to space since 2021.

SpaceX, founded by billionaire Elon Musk,

completed the first commercial spacewalk in 2024,

and is seen as the market leader in commercial spaceflights.

But the growing enthusiasm in China has been accompanied by doubts over how viable the country’s fledgling commercial space tourism industry really is.

Doubts have also surfaced online about InterstellOr’s credibility, as the Beijing-based company is relatively young, having been established just three years ago, in January 2023.

Investigations by Chinese netizens found that the company has only four publicly disclosed patents related to manned spacecraft.

They also found that some of the company’s key members lack aerospace credentials. Founder Lei Shiqing, for instance, has a background in broadcasting, business administration and applied psychology.

Mr Craig Curran, who is president of the DePrez Group of Travel Companies in the US, said that based on how long the US industry has taken to develop, InterstellOr and Deep Blue may not realise their respective 2028 and 2027 targets.

He cited the vast technical hurdles that need to be overcome to achieve safe and reliable launches for people, and the delays that companies such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had experienced.

Virgin Galactic, funded by English business magnate Richard Branson, took more than 10 years to progress from launching a proof-of-concept vehicle to flying people.

Blue Origin completed its first uncrewed test flight in 2015, before Mr Bezos and three other passengers completed the first crewed mission in July 2021.

China is now where the US industry was 10 to 15 years ago, said Mr Curran, a keen industry observer who has specialised in space tourism for 16 years.

But he thinks it may not take that long for China to catch up.

The higher-order benefits of space tourism are not sending tourists to space per se, he said, but the knock-on effects of developing a country’s industrial base and supply chain, for instance, in advanced materials, precision manufacturing and specialised software.

“Space tourism requires all of these technical aspects to be successful. And you are developing that outside of state-led programmes and creating the demand for that from the tourism sector,” he said.

Sub-orbital space travel is the dominant form of commercial space tourism, being more affordable and achievable than orbital flights, which fly at a much higher altitude and last longer – SpaceX has sold seats for private missions to the International Space Station for more than US$50 million (S$63 million).

While ticket prices are still astronomical, leading to criticism that space tourism is merely a rich person’s hobby, the hope is that more launches will eventually bring down costs.

Ms Lei, InterstellOr’s chief executive, said that the company hopes to build China’s first reusable commercial manned spacecraft, which would allow ticket prices to be lowered from 100 million to 1 million yuan, and ultimately to 300,000 yuan.

Singaporean space entrepreneur Lim Seng said that while the US currently leads in rocket-based space tourism, China is rapidly building up its capabilities and cost competitiveness.

“China could realistically become competitive or even dominant in suborbital tourism pricing, especially for regional or domestic markets,” said Mr Lim, who is based in Singapore and runs a company that develops high-altitude balloon missions to cross the Armstrong Line, about 19km above sea level.

He said that such space exploration will not only reduce costs, but also accelerate innovation in reusable vehicles and drive public engagement, inspiring the next generation of talents in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Mr Clayton Swope, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said that for the foreseeable future, space tourism will remain a niche market because of its costs.

The US and China would likely not be competing for the same tourists, he said. “I would be surprised if there were a lot of interest from American space tourists in flying on a Chinese capsule, and the reverse would be true as well.”

Mr Swope, who is an expert on space and technology, said: “(China) has already proven it can conduct orbital human spaceflight, so…this seems like a prestige project.”