Different from the traditional “communication, guidance, and remoteness” application scenarios, the rapid development of commercial aerospace is greatly broadening the imaginary boundaries of human use of space, giving rise to more diverse, more cutting-edge, and closer to the market future application scenarios. People are beginning to envision more disruptive scenarios including space tourism, space funerals, etc., pushing the commercial aerospace industry from the “technology verification” stage to a new era of “application creation”. 1. Space tourism Space tourism refers to tourism activities that send humans into space so that humans can watch the space scenery with their own eyes and experience the feeling of weightlessness. It mainly includes suborbital flights, orbital flights, etc. Suborbital flight means that passengers take an aircraft to reach the boundary between the earth’s atmosphere and space, experience weightlessness for 3-10 minutes, and then return to the ground. The entire journey usually takes about 90 minutes. Orbital flight means that passengers are sent into orbit around the Earth by a launch vehicle, stay in space for several days, overlook the Earth, and experience weightlessness for a longer period of time. In 2001, Dennis Tito (an American), the world’s first space tourist, took the Russian “Soyuz” manned spacecraft TM32 to the International Space Station for nine days of sightseeing. So far, more than 130 non-professional astronauts have entered space around the world. Currently, the consumer groups of space tourism are mainly ultra-high net worth individuals, scientific research institutions and corporate customers. However, with the continuous development of rocket reuse technology, the cost of space tourism will be significantly reduced, and the target customer group will gradually expand to high-income groups and ordinary income groups. At present, the main commercial aerospace companies exploring space tourism business include Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, China Aerospace, Deep Blue Aerospace, Traverser, etc. 2. Space funeral <\/p>\n
Space funeral refers to a funeral method in which a small portion of the deceased’s ashes (usually just a few grams) are put into a special small capsule container and sent into space through a spacecraft. In 2005, the space shuttle Discovery secretly carried the ashes of James Doohan, who played “Scotty” in “Star Trek”, to the International Space Station and then returned to Earth. In May 2022, the American company Celestis took advantage of the fifth commercial ride-sharing launch of SpaceX Falcon 9 to launch a satellite containing the ashes of 47 people into space. The satellite will orbit the earth for ten years. Celestis provides the family members of the deceased with GPS location data of the satellite to let relatives know when the deceased passed over them.<\/p>\n
3. Rocket intercontinental freight<\/p>\n
Rocket intercontinental freight is a future-focused exploration of disruptive logistics technology that can theoretically deliver goods to any location in the world at “hourly” speeds. Rocket intercontinental freight can achieve extremely fast point-to-point logistics transportation around the world, and has great potential in extremely time-sensitive fields such as military logistics and humanitarian relief. Currently, research and development is mainly promoted by the U.S. military (such as the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory AFRL) and private aerospace companies (such as SpaceX, Rocket Lab, etc.). In 2019, Taobao and Blue Arrow Aerospace jointly launched an imaginative “Baojian Plan”. The core goal is to use recyclable launch vehicles to achieve “one-hour delivery” of global online shopping products. In addition, Taobao has also launched relevant cooperation with rocket company Arrow Technology.<\/p>\n
Currently, commercial aerospace is transforming space from an unreachable “distance” into a “new frontier” for human economic and social activities. Scenarios that once existed only in science fiction novels are becoming reality step by step. “Space privileges” that only the country could undertake in the past are now being opened to enterprises, scientific research institutions and even individuals. In this great “new aerospace” era, the application scenarios of future commercial aerospace are only limited by our imagination. What we can imagine today may be just the tip of the iceberg of the future space economy. I remember that after watching the September 3rd Military Parade a few days ago, netizens shouted to Guo Fan that if “The Wandering Earth 3” is not released, it will change from a science fiction film to a costume documentary. Guo Fan has also admitted that “imagination cannot keep up with reality” and is worried that technological development will make the movie settings obsolete. The emergence of commercial aerospace has made the ceiling of aerospace no longer just the laws of physics and engineering capabilities, but also whether we can conceive of sustainable business models and application scenarios that can create value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Different from the traditional “communication, guidance, and remoteness” application scenarios, the rapid development of commercial aerospace is greatly broadening the imaginary boundaries of human use of space, giving rise to more diverse, more cutting-edge, and closer to the market future application scenarios. People are beginning to envision more disruptive scenarios including space tourism, space funerals, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25339"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}