To Boldly Go

Offered by Deep Blue Aerospace, a private space company established in 2016 in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, the tickets for the first two spots in a six-seater capsule went for 1 million yuan (US$142,857) each, with a 50,000 yuan (US$7,143) deposit. Deep Blue CEO and founder Huo Liang said on the livestream hosted by short-video platform Douyin that passengers would experience a 12-minute flight with about five minutes of weightlessness. The sale came during an annual online shopping promotion known as Double 11, with more than 3.4 million people tuning to see the tickets sold, which was on a first-come, first-served basis.　

“We chose the Double 11 shopping promotion to sell our first two tickets in order to make an impact on the market and the public, so people will get more familiar with space tourism,” a Deep Blue employee who did not reveal his name told NewsChina. The company is planning a 2027 launch, and might sell another two tickets later.　

Engaged in R&D of recoverable liquid-propellant rockets, Deep Blue plans to launch its first recoverable rocket Nebula-1 in 2025, sending a test six-seater capsule into orbit.　

The first passenger flight will also include two engineers, and is designed to cross the Kármán Line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, 100 kilometers above the surface.　

Deep Blue’s space tourists must be between 18 and 60 and in good health. In an interview with news portal Jiemian News, a Deep Blue executive who did not reveal his name said that the two buyers are both space enthusiasts, and one of them is a 30-year-old computer engineer in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.

In October 2024, SpaceX announced that Tito, now 83, and his 57-year-old wife have bought Starship tickets for a one-week flight around the moon.　

On September 12, 2024, American tech billionaire Jared Isaacman, 41, performed the first civilian “spacewalk” along with SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, 30. The pair brieffy popped out of the hatch to test new SpaceX spacesuits. Isaacman bankrolled the five-day Polaris Dawn mission, paying SpaceX an undisclosed sum. He also paid SpaceX and led the first private civilian space mission to orbit Earth in September 2021. Time magazine estimated he paid SpaceX US$200 million for four people for the three-day orbital mission. In December 2024, Isaacson was nominated by US President-elect Donald Trump as his pick for NASA administrator. He is expected to give greater prominence to private companies in space exploration.　

So far, SpaceX is the only company to provide orbital flights (about 300 kilometers above Earth) and travel to the space station (about 400 kilometers). Other firms offer suborbital travel.　

Blue Origin founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2000 is a leading supplier of suborbital travel. In November 2024, they successfully completed their ninth flight with passengers via the New Shepherd, a reusable sub-orbital launch vehicle. Blue Origin, which does not disclose the price of flights, has reportedly taken 47 passengers to space, including Bezos who was aboard the first flight in 2021. In August 2023, Britain’s Virgin Galactic, which operates from a base in New Mexico, US, took its first paying tourists to space aboard its space plane the VSS Unity. Virgin Galactic founder, British billionaire Richard Branson, made a suborbital flight in June 2021.　

According to Niu Min, founder of FutureSpace, a Beijing-based company engaged in hi-tech investment, Virgin Galactic’s space travel is like space “bungee jumping” as it only reaches an altitude of around 80 kilometers. Tickets now cost US$450,000 according to its website. Blue Origin goes higher, to around 100 kilometers up.　

Deep Blue CEO Huo Liang said on the October livestream that passengers aboard Deep Blue’s spaceship will experience the same conditions as other astronauts. When the capsule reaches its maximum altitude, it will separate from the carrier rocket and continue to fly for some time before descending.　

“It will be like a nearly vertical parabolic flight in space,” Niu said.　

Niu is bullish about space tourism, confident that the first Chinese company will see success within five years. “Many space companies are trying to enter the space tourism market from different technological angles,” he said.

In 2019, NASA announced it will allow individuals to take an American spaceship to the ISS for US$58 million, plus US$35,000 for board and lodging. In April 2022, SpaceX took four paying astronauts from Axiom Space, a private company, to the ISS for an eight-day mission. So far, Axiom, founded in 2016, has sent three astronaut crews to the ISS. It plans to develop commercial activities based around low-Earth orbit, and wants to add its own modules to the ISS, the BBC reported.　

“Recovery and reuse of carrier rockets have greatly contributed to price reductions. Recoverable rockets greatly increase launch efficiency,” Liu said, adding the key is developing more commercial rockets.　

In an interview with newspaper Beijing Business, Zheng Ze, Deep Blue’s deputy general manager, revealed that he expects the cost of a trip for an individual would halve if they can increase the number of launches per rocket from 10 to 15.　

“The more we reuse a rocket, the lower the cost,” he said, adding that in the future, rockets could be reused more than 50 times, which could cut the cost of a flight to under 100,000 yuan (US$14,286) per passenger.　

“In the following 5-10 years, it will be possible that a visitor wearing a 100 kilogram space suit can go to space, visit the [Chinese] space station, and the round-trip ticket will only cost 20,000- 30,000 yuan (US$2,857-4,286). It won’t be different to flying from Beijing to New York,” Huo Liang told news outlet Shanghai Observer. “Our technologies are advancing in this direction. There are no limits. The only thing we have to consider is how to improve engineering, reliability and comfortability,” he added.

“It is a problem of the product rather than the technology,” Deep Blue executive Zheng Ze told NewsChina, adding that since the failed test, they have proposed over 40 improvements.　

Zheng said there will be around dozens or even hundreds of tests before it launches with passengers. “It’s a common understanding that the rocket has to fall several times before the final success,” he said.　

In the Jiemian News interview, the anonymous Deep Blue executive said it will conduct strict tests that cover extreme environments and emergencies.　

“We won’t start commercial operations until we’ve completed dozens of manned tests flights,” he said. Deep Blue is now preparing for the next recovery test from a high altitude.　

Huo Liang said if that VTVL test is a success, Deep Blue will do the next one from an altitude of 100 kilometers.　

Deep Blue’s Chinese competitors are working hard too. CAS Space, a subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences based in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, is also eying commercial space flights. They told NewsChina that they will provide the service on the premise of high safety and reliability. Company president Yang Yiqiang said CAS Space has finished developing their suborbital spacecraft and capsules, which are now undergoing tests.　

“We expect to make at least 15 successful flights before our official launch,” he said.　

According to a 2024 report on China’s commercial aerospace industry released by FutureSpace, by 2023, there had been 537 registered commercial areo-space enterprises registered in China, excluding branches or sub-companies. In 2023, China saw 67 rocket launches, 24 of which were commercial launches.　

However, this figure seems small compared to SpaceX’s 96 launches in the same year. Of its total 419 launches, according to the SpaceX website, it launched 128 rockets as of December 8, 2024, mostly for Starlink. Its Falcon Heavy rockets have a payload of over 64 metric tons, over 10 times that of Chinese commercial ones.　

But since commercial space companies did not emerge in China until 10 years ago, Yang is optimistic. He told NewsChina that although commercial rocket companies are 30 years behind US rocket recovery technologies, it will not take them that long to catch up.

For example, Armadillo Aerospace in the US closed in 2013 as it ran out of money. Four years later, another American company XCOR Aerospace, which developed rocket engines and reusable spacecraft, applied for bankruptcy protection after failing to secure funding.　

An analysis of China’s commercial rocket industry by Sun Naixin from the China Center for International Economic Exchanges and Sun Fei from the School of Traffic and Transportation at Beijing Jiaotong University cited data from qcc.com, a Chinese enterprise registration website, as saying that over the past 10 years, nearly 40,000 enterprises engaged in aerospace-related business have “disappeared.”　

The report called for the remaining companies to focus more on exploring market potential while continuing to develop their technologies.

Deep Blue sold its first two tickets in minutes, and continued to receive floods of inquiries later. Zheng said there is a strong desire to experience space travel and space fans follow new developments closely, at home and abroad.　

A 2023 survey by Yin Zhenying, an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, asked 1,888 respondents in China and the US how much they would pay for space travel. Chinese respondents said they would pay an average of US$1.6 million each, more than American respondents who would pay an average US$910,000 each.　

A report released by China Aerospace Academy of Systems Science and Engineering in 2020 indicated that based on the present price of space travel, about 1.37 million Chinese households with assets of more than 6 million yuan (US$826,253) could afford a suborbital space trip.　

In October 2024, Economy magazine cited a report released by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey that said by 2035, the space economy’s size will rocket from US$630 billion in 2023 to US$1.8 trillion with an annual growth rate of 9 percent.　

“The space economy represented by space tourism will drive the commercial space industry up to a bigger market which will shift from serving enterprises to serving individuals. Space tourism is an inevitable trend,” Niu said. “But we still need time to improve our technologies and increase its value for investors,” he added.　

“In the next two or three decades, commercial space tourism may enter three phases, suborbital flights, travel to the space station, and finally trips to the moon. Suborbital travel is the best way for commercial companies to keep testing and improving the safety, stability and comfortability of space travel,” Yang said, Zheng Ze agrees. “Space tourism is one of our objectives. After we accomplish this, we’ll provide more commercial services and products based on our recoverable rocket technologies,” he said. He is already looking forward to a future when commercial rocket flights provide regular transportation across China. “It’s all possible,” he told Beijing Business.　

To ensure profitability and to lower costs, Yang suggested commercial spaceflight companies first explore cargo-only flights or doing tests for other companies in suborbital flights.　

Niu agrees. “Along with technological improvements, services related to space travel like space medical care, ground guarantee, laws and regulations and space control will evolve, and we might even lower costs for an operation similar to plane flights,” he said.　

“If we ever get to live on other planets, rockets and spaceships will be transportation workhorses. But when on Earth the market will see a boom depends on how fast the technologies advance,” he added.