When Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson landed in the New Mexico desert, after his first trip to outer space, he told a group of reporters and friends that he was optimistic about the future. 'Imagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds, from anywhere, of any gender, or any ethnicity, have equal access to space,' he said. 'And they will in turn, I think, inspire us back here on Earth.' Almost a year later, booking a trip to take the same ride, 50 miles up to the edge of Earth's atmosphere in Virgin Galactic's spaceplane, would cost US$450,000. And that number is near the low end for private spaceflight tickets. An eight-day commercial flight to the International Space Station, launched in April 2022, cost around US$55 million per seat for the four Axiom Space astronauts on board Elon Musk-owned SpaceX's Dragon capsule. While public pricing for Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital hops to space and back have yet to be released, one of the first spots fetched US$28 million at auction in 2021. Blue Origin expects to eventually get the price down to below a million US dollars, but even then it's clear that Branson's imaginary world is still distant. Author Frank White coined a phrase, 'the overview effect', to describe the transcendent feeling of unity and fragility supposed to be experienced by those who go into space and look back on Earth. This feeling, White says, should be something that everyone has access to, and he is in favour of making space travel a basic human right. But at these prices, not everyone has equal access to space yet.
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