NASA announced on Friday that its side of the International Space Station is open for business. It won’t come cheap.
Daily access to the life support system and toilet will run an amateur astronaut $11,250 per day. Tack on an additional $22,500 a day for food and -- air. That all adds up to a nightly tab of about $35,000. And that doesn’t count the flight.
Those flights could be provided by Elon Musk’s SpaceX aboard its Dragon or on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program for an estimated $50 million per person.
All this comes with one little hitch. Neither company has so far transported people beyond the Earth’s atmosphere
NASA’s announcement comes a day after Amazon.com Inc. said at its MARS conference in Las Vegas that it plans to take to space. The tech giant plans to spend billions of dollars to build a network of thousands of satellites to provide broadband internet service across the globe in the latest space adventure for Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos.
Bezos’ other company, Blue Origin LLC, has already set lofty targets. He unveiled its own lunar lander in May, saying it’s “time to go back to the moon.”