Space hero Chris Hadfield on the possibility of space tourism

How soon private citizen will be able to go to space?
I think space travel will continue just like travel and exploration has continued everywhere historically. Initially it's dangerous and difficult, I mean if you're the first person to walk across the Alps or the first person to sail across to Australia, or sail the ocean, those are dangerous things. And it's complicated and normally it takes a big organization to get that going, like a government or or the expedition of Columbus or whatever. But then once we've done it enough in the explorer phase then we figure out ways to make it more safe and therefore cheaper. And then eventually it becomes commercially worthwhile to go. And that's happened all over the whole planet and that's the stage where the space flight is as well right now. It's still very dangerous and very complicated but it's just now maybe starting to be possible for private citizens to be able to pay for a very short but actual flight to space. And that's an important transition, that that's an early stage of transitioning from government and National Space Exploration down to private space exploration. It's a natural process and the first person really doing this is Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic. *Excerpt from my interview with Chris Hadfield – First Canadian Astronaut to walk in space. Read more how the life on Earth looks like from the space here, on the beauty of a spacewalk here on the on the difference between fear and danger here, on how fear of failure affects our life here and what does it mean for us like human race to be able to go to space here