Chinese space-tech start-up Deep Blue Aerospace has been selling tickets for space travel on e-commerce site Taobao, with the first two made available being snapped up immediately, the South China Morning Post and the Global Times report.
Those two tickets sold on Thursday for 1 million yuan each (around US$140,000), while another batch of 20 later went on sale for 2 million yuan each (around US$280,000). For the latest offering, buyers must pay a 100,000 yuan deposit online before making the rest of the payment in-person at the company’s research centre in Beijing.
Pending a physical exam, the tickets grant their owners a 12-minute suborbital trip scheduled for 2027. Participants will reportedly spend at least five minutes of the journey in a state of zero gravity, and reach a maximum height of 150 kilometres.
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Deep Blue Aerospace has said it will use the three-year lead up to the flight’s scheduled departure to ensure its rocket meets the highest safety standards.
Space tourism is already underway elsewhere. US entrepreneur Dennis Tito became the world’s first space tourist when he paid US$20 million to accompany a Russian mission to the International Space Station back in 2001. More recently, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’s space tourism company Blue Origin successfully transported a paying customer to space and back in 2021, while Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the UK’s Virgin Galactic and a few others have followed suit.
Deep Blue Aerospace was established in 2016, and has focused on developing reusable rockets. It conducted the first high-altitude vertical recovery flight test of its Nebula-1 rocket at a spaceport in Inner Mongolia last month, though the mission was not deemed successful due to an anomaly with its final landing phase.
