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 dozen flights that count, and a long, expensive silence in the middle where almost nothing happened at all.

This is not a log of every ticket ever sold — Blue Origin alone has flown dozens of New Shepard missions since 2021, most carrying a similar mix of paying passengers to a similar 11 minutes above the Kármán line. What follows is curated: the flights that were a genuine first, a record, or a turning point. Each one is dated and sourced below, so you can check it yourself.

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. Everything on this page after 2021 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

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. We update this page when a new flight clears that bar, 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.