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China offers commercial space trip to private passengers for ₹2 crore: Report
Expert say that at a time in the trip, up to seven tourists could fly on a 10-minute journey to an altitude of about 100 km.
China is working on the mission to launch its first commercial space trip for private passengers. The mission expected by 2025 will have a suborbital trip to the edge of space, a report from South China Morning Post informs.
Chinese space tourism would be fully grown by 2025, the report quotes Yang Yiqiang, the general director of the Long March 11 rocket project in 2018 and founder of a government-backed commercial space launch enterprise CAS Space. Yang adds that the cost of the mission may come to 2-3 million yuan (around ₹2-3.4 crore).
Further, elaborating on the plan, he termed suborbital space travel as more developed and better suitable for most of the people. He mentioned that at a time in the trip, up to seven tourists could fly on a 10-minute journey to an altitude of about 100 km.
According to Nasa, in a sub-orbital spaceflight, the spacecraft reaches space but its trajectory intersects the atmosphere of the Earth, so that it does not complete one orbital revolution. Here, the path of an object launched from Earth reaches 100 km above sea level, and then falls back to Earth.
To promote application of commercial space technologies, the company is said to have already signed an agreement with the country’s largest state-owned travel corporation, China Tourism Group.
Before sending the passengers into space, it will undertake a number of unmanned test flights beginning from next year.
Boom in commercial space activities
China is a late entrant in the commercial space activities. Last year, Elon Musk owned SpaceX was successful in sending four private passengers into orbit. None of them were professional astronauts.
SpaceX said that passengers flew at even higher altitude than the current orbits of the space station. The civilian-crewed craft orbited Earth for three days at an altitude of about 575 km.
Blue Origin, a space company owned by another entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos, completed its sixth human space flight mission on August 4 this year.
However, the report says that China is quickly establishing its presence. As of the data from last year, it has 370 commercial space-related companies.
Along with this, space related companies are also sprawling in the country. The report states that from 2017 to 2021, over 10,000 space-related companies were registered each year.
