In the Star Trek television series, whose broadcast began in September 1966 in the United States, the actor William Shatner embodied the emblematic Captain Kirk, the hero at the head of the USS Enterprise Spaceship. On Wednesday, October 13, the 90-year-old comedian, for real, on board a rocket built by Blue Origin, the company of Billionaire Jeff Bezos, for a flight to more than 100 kilometers of altitude – either The “border” between the atmosphere and space. He had to join the dozen tourists of the space that have already set foot out of the orbit of the atmosphere of our planet.
For two decades, in Le Monde, spatial tourism has attracted as much enthusiasm as fear. The first time the newspaper evokes it in its columns, it is to relate a withdrawal. On June 8, 1999, Journalist Hervé Morin tells how the British Magnat of Waste Management Peter Llewellyn canceled his departure, aboard a Russian vessel Soyuz, for the Mir station, in which he had planned to spend ten days. A trip to $ 100 million, all inclusive. This failure comes to corroborate the doubts of the author about the possibility of this science fiction tourism: “For some time, our land suburbs remains a space reserved for professional backpackers of space agencies.”
A Possible industry
The announcement, on April 28, 2001, from the departure of the first tourist of space, the American Dennis Tito, whose ticket for the international space station to $ 20 million is used to bail out the coffers of the Russian Space Program – Travel Manager -, however, fucks curiosity. “This contract could announce many”, prognostic reporter François Bonnet, March 24, 2001.
Several travelers, always sent by Moscow, come support this intuition. It is confirmed when American businesses join, in 2004, what Heri Morin imagines as a possible industry, more only to businessmen “able to pay $ 20 million for a strapontin on Mir or the space station”. The journalist cites, on 5 October 2004, an American study estimating at 15,000 the number of volunteers by 2020.
The development of Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and Spacex, respectively led by billionaires Richard Branson (Virgin), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Elon Musk (Tesla), arouses significant media attention. In 2005, The Space Tourist’s Handbook (“The Space Tourist Guide”), written by Eric Anderson, the CEO of Space Adventures, is described by Eric Leser, corresponding to the United States, as a “real tour guide” , in which we can read the “instructions given to millionaires on the take-off”.
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