By Futurist Thomas Frey
When Orbital Resorts Become Reality
By 2035-2040, space tourism will have evolved from ultra-exclusive proof-of-concept flights into a genuine vacation industry—still expensive, still limited to the wealthy, but recognizable as tourism rather than experimental adventure. Let me walk you through what vacationing in space actually looks like in this timeframe and who gets to go.
The Two-Tier Market
Space tourism splits into two fundamentally different experiences: suborbital flights and orbital stays. Suborbital is the gateway drug—a brief, intense experience that technically reaches space but lasts minutes. Orbital is the real vacation, lasting days or weeks with genuine time to experience weightlessness and the profound cognitive shift astronauts call the Overview Effect.
Suborbital Flights (2035 Reality): Companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have been running commercial flights since the mid-2020s. By 2035, the experience is refined, safety-proven, and—crucially—cheaper. What cost $200,000-$450,000 in 2025 drops closer to $100,000 per passenger as launch cadence increases and competition drives efficiency.
The experience: 10-90 minutes total. Powerful rocket ride to 50-100 kilometers altitude. Several minutes of weightlessness floating freely in the cabin. The main attraction: seeing Earth’s curvature and the thin blue line of atmosphere against space’s blackness. Then descent and landing. It’s less a vacation than a high-intensity bucket-list experience—spectacular, but over before you’ve processed what happened.
Orbital Stays (2035-2040 Emergence): This is where true space tourism begins. Projects like Voyager Station and other orbital hotels aim for operational status by the late 2020s to early 2030s. By 2035-2040, the first generation of dedicated space hotels is operational, offering multi-day stays designed for tourists rather than astronauts.
Initial costs: around $5 million for a three-day stay. Expensive, but orders of magnitude cheaper than the $55 million per seat SpaceX charged for early ISS missions. The market expands from billionaires to mere multi-millionaires—still exclusive, but no longer requiring nation-state wealth.
What Orbital Hotels Actually Offer
The difference between early orbital trips and purpose-built space hotels is dramatic. Early missions to ISS resemble camping expeditions: cramped sleeping pods, basic food rehydration, significant pre-flight training, and zero-gravity conditions requiring strict exercise regimens to prevent muscle and bone loss.
Future space hotels like Voyager Station are designed to resemble luxury cruise ships or resorts. Key differences:
Artificial Gravity: Hotels use rotation to generate artificial gravity—perhaps around 0.7G. This makes sleeping, eating, and basic movement comfortable rather than requiring constant adaptation to weightlessness. You can walk normally, use regular bathrooms, and sleep in actual beds rather than tethered sleeping bags.
Accommodations: Private staterooms rather than cramped crew quarters. Public areas including restaurants, entertainment rooms, gyms, and zero-gravity sports areas. The central hub maintains zero-G for recreational floating and sports, while rotating outer rings provide comfortable gravity.
Fine Dining: Real restaurants with actual chefs preparing food that doesn’t come from rehydration packets. Orbital hotels solve the logistics of food preparation in space the way cruise ships solved it on Earth—with dedicated facilities and proper kitchens.
The View: This remains the primary draw. Unobstructed panoramic views of glowing Earth, 16 sunrises and sunsets per day, deep space visible from windows and observation cupolas. The Overview Effect—the profound cognitive shift from viewing Earth from space—is what guests pay for. Everything else is infrastructure enabling them to spend days experiencing it rather than minutes.
Who Actually Goes
By 2040, the space tourist profile expands beyond tech billionaires and wealthy adventurers to include:
- Wealthy retirees spending inheritance on bucket-list experiences
- High-earning professionals saving for years for one orbital trip
- Corporate incentive trips for top performers
- Honeymoon couples with serious budgets
- Medical tourists combining space travel with experimental treatments requiring microgravity
It’s still exclusive—$100,000 for suborbital and $5 million for orbital stays limits the market severely. But it’s no longer experimental. It’s a luxury vacation industry with established safety records, regular schedules, and competition driving improvements.
The Experience That Changes You
Whether suborbital or orbital, every space tourist reports the same thing: seeing Earth from space fundamentally changes perspective. The thin atmosphere protecting fragile life. The absence of borders visible from orbit. The realization of how small and interconnected everything is.
This cognitive shift—the Overview Effect—is what people are really paying for. The weightlessness, the luxury accommodations, the novelty of being in space—those are deliverables. But the perspective shift is the product.
Final Thoughts
By 2035-2040, vacationing in space transitions from impossible to merely very expensive. Suborbital flights become accessible to upper-middle-class adventurers saving for once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Orbital hotels serve wealthy tourists looking for genuine vacations in space, not just brief glimpses.
It’s not mass tourism—it’s exclusive, expensive, and limited to perhaps tens of thousands annually rather than millions. But it’s real, routine, and safer than the early experimental phase. The space vacation industry exists, and it’s transforming how humanity thinks about Earth by giving more people the chance to see it from the outside.
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