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商业航天实体 > Emerging personal spaceflight

条目：Space tourism
参见：Billionaire space race
Before 2004, the year it was legalized in the US, no privately operated crewed spaceflight had ever occurred. The only private individuals to journey to space went as space tourists in the Space Shuttle or on Russian Soyuz flights to Mir or the International Space Station.
All private individuals who flew to space before Dennis Tito's self-financed International Space Station visit in 2001 had been sponsored by their home governments or by private corporations. Those trips include US Congressman Bill Nelson's January 1986 flight on the Space Shuttle Columbia and Japanese television reporter Toyohiro Akiyama's 1990 flight to the Mir Space Station.
The Ansari X PRIZE was intended to stimulate private investment in the development of spaceflight technologies. 21 June 2004, test flight of SpaceShipOne, a contender for the X PRIZE, was the first human spaceflight in a privately developed and operated vehicle.
On 27 September 2004, following the success of SpaceShipOne, Richard Branson, owner of Virgin and Burt Rutan, SpaceShipOne's designer, announced that Virgin Galactic had licensed the craft's technology, and were planning commercial space flights in 2.5 to 3 years. A fleet of five craft (SpaceShipTwo, launched from the WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane) were to be constructed, and flights would be offered at around $200,000 each, although Branson said he planned to use this money to make flights more affordable in the long term. A test flight of SpaceShipTwo in October 2014 resulted in a crash during one of the two pilots died.
In December 2004, United States President George W. Bush signed into law the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act. The Act resolved the regulatory ambiguity surrounding private spaceflights and is designed to promote the development of the emerging U.S. commercial human space flight industry.
On 12 July 2006, Bigelow Aerospace launched the Genesis I, a subscale pathfinder of an orbital space station module. Genesis II was launched on 28 June 2007, and there are plans for additional prototypes to be launched in preparation for the production model BA 330 spacecraft.[需要更新]
Zero2infinity, a Spanish aerospace company, is developing a high-altitude balloon-based launch vehicle termed a bloostar to launch small satellites to orbit for customers, as well as platform for near-space tourism. World View, a stratospheric balloon exploration company based in Tucson, Ariz., is similarly leveraging its stratospheric balloon technology to launch its remote sensing services for government and commercial customers, as well as developing its own space tourism offering that would lift passengers up to 100,000 feet for a 6-8 journey. Similar projects of stratospheric balloon tourism are being developed by multiple other companies around the world (Zephalto, Space Perspective, ...), though none has yet made a high altitude crewed flight (as of Feb. 2021).
On July 11, 2021, Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic made the first successful flight to space.
On July 20, 2021, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin also made a successful flight to space.
On September 16, 2021, Crew Dragon Resilience Inspiration4 mission operated by Space X became the first orbital spaceflight with only private citizens aboard.