What does it cost?
Every operator, every price tier — sourced and dated.
Price Index →Can I actually go?
Budget, age, and health requirements.
Eligibility guide →Not going to space yet?
Explore the night sky from your backyard.
See Space Now guides →Who’s flying now?
Flying, grounded, or returning — live.
See the board →A seat to space used to cost a fortune. It’s in freefall.
Who’s flying right now
Ask anyone who’s been.
There is a name for what happens at the window — the overview effect, coined by the writer Frank White in 1987. You stop seeing a map of countries and start seeing one planet. Almost everyone who comes back says nothing prepared them for it. And for the first time, that window is open to people who were never astronauts.
“What you have given me is the most profound experience. I am so filled with emotion.”
“I’ve been waiting a long time to finally get up there… I could always beat the guys on what they were doing, because I was always stronger.”
“That last view of the Earth from the cupola made me emotional… and I knew I’d be thinking about that for the rest of my life.”
Four Tiers of Spaceflight
From minutes of weightlessness to months on Mars. Pick a tier to see what a seat costs in 2026 and who sells one.
Suborbital Flights
Virgin Galactic returns Feb 20273–4 minutes of weightlessness above the Kármán Line. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have flown civilians since 2021. Neither is flying today; Virgin’s new Delta ship is due back first, in February 2027.
See the suborbital lineup for 2026 →Orbital Missions
BookableDays or weeks orbiting Earth aboard the ISS or a private station. Axiom Space has completed four crewed ISS missions; SpaceX Crew Dragon enables private astronaut programs — the premium tier of current space tourism.
See the full Axiom Space cost breakdown →Lunar Experiences
Coming late 2020sFlyby missions around the Moon and eventual surface excursions. NASA’s Artemis program is returning humans to the lunar surface. Private lunar tourism packages are entering pre-booking stages for the late 2020s.
See how every tier compares →Mars
Early 2030sSpaceX’s Starship is designed for point-to-point Earth travel and eventual Mars missions. The first crewed Mars flights are targeting the early 2030s. Mars glamping, the dream of a tourist camp on the red planet, comes after that, and no one has put a date or a price on it yet.
Read the full Mars trip cost guide →Stratospheric balloon
Returns 2026Hours under a balloon at about 30 km: a black sky and the curve of the Earth through the window, but no weightlessness, and not technically space.
See the Space Perspective balloon breakdown →Experience Space Today
You don’t need a rocket — or a fortune. Real space experiences you can have right now, from a free launch view to floating in zero gravity.
Explore all experiences →The gear that opens the sky
You don’t need a rocket — or a fortune. A $90 pair of binoculars shows Jupiter’s moons tonight. Here’s the gear actually worth the money, honestly reviewed.
Space Headlines
The 1st SpaceX Starship to survive a launch to space just came home to its launch site
Nearly three months after surviving its launch to space and a tumultuous trial at sea, the first Starship spacecraft to survive its ocean splashdown has returned to Starbase.SpaceX shared new photos and video of Ship 40, the Starship upper stage that launched…
