Like the Americans, but cheaper: China enters the space tourism market
Miscellaneous / / April 04, 2023
Yang Yiqiang, one of China's top rocket scientists, said his private space company CAS Space will start sending its first tourists on suborbital flights as early as 2025. And the "full flowering" of this area in the country is expected in 2027. About it writes South China Morning Post citing Global Times.
Yiqiang was the CEO of the Long March 11 rocket project in 2018 and the founder of a state-backed company to study the commercial use of rockets.
The flight model of CAS Space will be exactly the same as that of Jeff Bezos Blue Origin:
- a reusable rocket with a passenger capsule starts from the cosmodrome and reaches an altitude of about 100 km (Karman line);
- the launch vehicle is disconnected and makes a vertical landing due to its own engines;
- the capsule with passengers makes a flight by inertia for about 10 minutes, allowing tourists to feel weightlessness, and then lands with the help of parachutes.
According to the engineer, such suborbital travel would cost about 2-3 million yuan (285-427 thousand rubles). dollars, while Blue Origin has about $2.8 million). At the same time, up to 7 tourists will be able to fly in the spacecraft.
China's commercial spaceflight has the best development potential and will overtake the US within 10 years.
Yang Yiqiang
CAS Space
The first unmanned test flights will start next year.
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