The future is here America. Elon Musk and SpaceX are planning to take two tourists around the moon. There has been plenty of speculation in the past but Musk has set his plans that trip will take place in 2018. The trip is only going to last a week and, unfortunately, there will not be a landing on the moon. Cost to get a seat? Most likely an amount of money the common person can only dream of. The two available seats are already claimed by two individuals who have put down huge deposits.
Basically, space travel is currently reserved for the wealthy. It makes sense. The cost to develop the Falcon 9 and Dragon, the SpaceX’s launch device and capsule, was almost a billion dollars! Hence, space travel is expensive. It is even more expensive when there is no true purpose to it. When NASA and other space programs travel to space, they do experiments and research. This leads to them getting more funding from the government and other interested parties. A tourist trip like this would end up lacking the research funding and meaning that the tourists are in charge offsetting the costs.
Unless you are filthy rich and have pools of money (or are an actual astronaut who does not have to pay for space travel because you earned the job), space travel is off the books. But the world is heading in the right direction. All great technological advances start off only being available to rich because of their cost. As times go on and the technology advances, commercialized space travel will prevail for the common people. Hopefully, SpaceX continues its good work to make this happen.
