The Space Tourism Flight Timeline

Our price index tells you what a seat costs today. This page tells you who has actually flown, and why each flight mattered — the firsts, the records, the ones that moved the whole industry forward a step. It starts with one man alone on a Soyuz in 2001 and runs through the New Shepard flight that closed out the program’s run in January 2026. Twenty-five years, a long, expensive silence in the middle where almost nothing happened at all, and then, once it started, one program that flew often enough to log in full.

Blue Origin paused New Shepard on January 30, 2026, which means its tourism run is now a closed book — so this timeline carries every one of its 17 crewed flights, not just the famous ones. Every other operator here is still curated to the flights that were a genuine first, a record, or a turning point, since Space Adventures, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Axiom Space each fly far less often and most of their missions are already milestones on their own. Each flight is dated and sourced below, so you can check it yourself.

The strangest thing on this timeline is the empty stretch between 2009 and 2021.

Every milestone flight

Filter by orbital or suborbital, and follow the source link on any row for the original reporting.

The 12-year gap

The strangest thing on this timeline is the empty stretch between 2009 and 2021. Space Adventures brokered seven paying tourists onto Soyuz flights to the ISS between 2001 and 2009, then it just stopped — NASA retired the Space Shuttle in 2011 and needed every remaining Soyuz seat for its own astronauts, so there was nowhere left to sell a ticket. Commercial space tourism didn’t resume until Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic both flew their founders within nine days of each other in July 2021, followed two months later by Inspiration4, the first all-civilian crew to reach orbit on their own vehicle rather than hitching a ride to the ISS. The old way got one last outing that December, when Space Adventures put Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa and Yozo Hirano on a Soyuz to the ISS — its first tourist flight since 2009, and, as it turned out, the last of its kind. Almost everything after it is a different era: private companies flying their own hardware, not tourists riding along on someone else’s government mission.

How we chose these flights

For every operator except one, we aren’t trying to be a complete flight log — that’s a different kind of site, and it’s not the version of this story we think is worth telling. We picked the missions that set a record, opened a market, or were a genuine first: the first paying tourist, the first woman, the first all-civilian crew, the first private spacewalk, the first polar orbit. If a flight repeated something already on this list without adding a new milestone, it’s not here.

Blue Origin is the exception. New Shepard flew often enough, and now has a firm stopping point in its January 2026 pause, that logging all 17 of its crewed flights is actually the more honest choice — a handful of them didn’t set any record, and we say so rather than inventing significance that isn’t there. Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity is a smaller version of the same story: the ship is retired now, and with Galactic 07 the timeline carries all seven of its commercial flights, each one a genuine first or turning point in its own right. We update this page when a new flight clears that bar (or, when a paused program resumes), and we’ll keep the sourcing current as reporting on older flights gets corrected.

Curious what a seat like these would cost you today? Start with the price index for current fares, or space tourism companies for a side-by-side of who’s actually selling tickets right now. If the realistic version of this is a telescope in your backyard rather than a seat on a rocket, the See Space Now hub is the honest place to start.