Space Tourism: China to start space travel by 2025, here's how much it will cost
By 2025, as part of China's ongoing massive push towards space research, tourist trips to space are planned to commence.
Yang Yiqiang, founder of a government-backed firm looking into commercial usage of rockets, predicts that commercial space travel would be in "full flower" by 2027. In 2018, he also oversaw the Long March 11 rocket project as its general director.
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According to Yang, in an interview with Global Times, China's commercial space industry has moved from the 1.0 era, defined by foundational manufacturing and research and development (R&D), to the 2.0 era, fueled by applications and market forces.
After another decade, the market should reach the same degree of advancement as the United States.
According to Yang, suborbital flight is the most developed and suitable for the majority of people among the many types of space travel. The 10-minute flight would carry passengers over the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space, where they would experience weightlessness for a few minutes.
According to estimates, China will launch its first commercial suborbital space journey in 2025, with tickets reportedly costing between 2 and 3 million yuan (about $287,200 and $430,800).
According to an industry assessment, China in 2021 had more than 370 firms specialised on satellite production, rocket launching, and important downstream services based on orbiting satellite.
However, the size of Chinese commercial players in the industry is still very tiny, and few of their rocket and satellite businesses produce profits.