Space Tourism Statistics 2026

Twenty-five years after Dennis Tito paid his way onto a Soyuz, the honest answer to “how many people have actually been space tourists?” is still surprisingly hard to find. Most numbers in circulation are either old, unsourced, or counting something different from what they claim. So here is the count, built from a flight log where every entry carries its own date and source, and recomputed every time this page is rebuilt.

204 people have flown on 44 commercial and private spaceflights since 2001. Set aside the operators’ own pilots and professional crew and 151 of them were passengers. Suborbital flights account for 73% of everyone who has gone: 149 people on 28 flights, against 55 people on 16 orbital missions. The busiest year so far was 2025, with 50 people on 9 flights.

The cheapest ticket to space has fallen about 133-fold since 2001. The price of orbit has not fallen at all.

What counts, and what does not

These are the definitions behind every number on this page, stated once so a writer citing a figure knows exactly what it measures.

A flight counts if it was a crewed flight sold, brokered or flown commercially and it carried at least one person who was not a government astronaut on a government mission: a paying customer, a sponsored guest, a private-mission crew member, or a research passenger on a commercial seat. Government crews on government vehicles do not count, so NASA, Roscosmos and CNSA missions are out even when a private company built the rocket. People aboard is everyone on the vehicle, including the operator’s pilots and any professional commander. Passengers is that number minus the pilots, the professional crew flying the vehicle, and the operator’s own employees filling a seat, so a Soyuz commander, a Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor and Axiom’s commander are crew, while a seat bought by a national space agency on a commercial mission is a passenger. People are counted per flight, so someone who flew twice is counted twice; the log records flights, not individuals. One consequence worth knowing: Virgin Galactic’s first passenger flight, Unity 22, counts six people and one passenger, because everyone aboard except Richard Branson was on the payroll.

The flight log behind this page is complete for every flight that carried a private passenger: Blue Origin’s New Shepard through its January 2026 pause, every Virgin Galactic flight with cabin occupants, every SpaceX private free-flyer, every Axiom mission, every Space Adventures Soyuz seat, and SpaceShipOne’s three 2004 flights. Head counts were verified flight by flight against the operator’s own record or the mission’s documented crew list. Prices come from the Space Tourism Price Index, which is re-verified weekly against each operator’s published or reported figures.

How many people have flown

By tier, by operator, and by year. Passengers is people aboard minus the operator’s own crew, so a Virgin Galactic flight with two pilots and four in the cabin counts six people and four passengers.

Three operators account for most of the total. Blue Origin has flown 98 people on 17 New Shepard flights, Virgin Galactic 48 on 8, and Axiom Space 16 on 4 missions to the International Space Station. The last flight in the log is Blue Origin NS-38 on Jan 22, 2026, 230 days before this page was last rebuilt on September 9, 2026. Both suborbital operators are paused in 2026, which is why the count has stalled: Blue Origin set New Shepard aside for at least two years to build its lunar lander, and Virgin Galactic is between spaceplanes until 2027.

What a seat costs

The Price Index tracks 12 operators across four tiers. Today’s ranges, and each tier’s status:

The entry price of spaceflight has fallen from $20,000,000 in 2001 to about $150,000 today, roughly 133 times cheaper. That collapse came from selling a different product, a few minutes above the Kármán line instead of a week in orbit, not from orbit getting cheaper. An orbital seat cost $20 million in 2001 and about $55 million now, 2.75 times the 2001 price. Of the 12 operators on the board, 2 are flying, 5 are paused, and 5 have not flown a customer yet.

How safe it has been

No paying passenger has died on a commercial spaceflight. Across the 44 flights in the log, from 2001 through 2026, the record is zero passenger fatalities. The commercial era has had one fatal accident: the loss of Virgin Galactic’s VSS Enterprise on October 31, 2014, a test flight with no passengers aboard, in which co-pilot Michael Alsbury was killed. Two other losses of vehicle carried nobody: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule destroyed in a ground test in April 2019, and Blue Origin’s uncrewed NS-23 booster failure in September 2022, after which the capsule’s escape system worked as designed. The fuller reading, including why a clean record over a few dozen flights is not the same as an airline’s, is in Is Space Tourism Safe?

Cite these numbers