The deadly crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo in California may be raising concerns in the United States over the safety of space tourism, but so far it does not seem to have dampened the enthusiasm of would-be astronauts in China.
“Even if my body doesn’t work, my mind will always be determined to go into space,” said Sheng Tianxing, a 41-year-old tea trader from the southeastern province of Zhejiang. In June, he put down $100,000 to reserve a seat on a rocket that promises to carry him into space for about six minutes in 2016.
“I haven’t thought about the money issue at all. Anything can go wrong. If you worry about this, you’ll just have too many things to worry about,” said Mr. Sheng, who had just returned from
a holiday in France.
Dexo Travel, a Beijing-based sales agent that sells space trips operated by XCOR Aerospace, Virgin Galactic’s only competitor in offering civilian suborbital space journeys, said that none of its clients had called to cancel a space flight since the crash last Friday, which killed one pilot and seriously injured another.
Wang Luye, a travel agent at Dexo, said the company was continuing to receive inquiries about flights “as if nothing happened.”
(Virgin Galactic is barred by United States regulations from selling tickets to citizens of China and 21 other countries because its spacecraft are powered by rocket engines manufactured in the United States, using technology considered to have potential military applications.)
XCOR has sold 34 tickets for commercially operated space flights in China since it began offering them in the country late last year. That represents about one-tenth of all the bookings the company has received since it started taking orders in 2011. XCOR’s first flight carrying space tourists is expected to take off in late 2015.
Zhang Yong, chief executive of Dexo Travel, has predicted that China, with its growing wealth, is set to become the largest market for space tourism.
Zhang Xiaoyu, a 29-year-old entrepreneur in Beijing who has booked a space flight for next year, said he compared the trips offered by Virgin Galactic and XCOR before he signed the contract, and was confident of the safety of the vehicle that will carry him aloft.
“They use different technologies,” said Mr. Zhang, whose dream is to see Earth from space by the time he is 30.
XCOR’s chief executive, Jeff Greason, said in a statement Monday that XCOR’s Lynx is “a very different vehicle” from the SpaceShipTwo that crashed. He promised, though, that XCOR would continue to test and retest the vehicle and its systems.
In comments on social media, some Chinese reacted to the Virgin Galactic crash as an occasion to complain about the company’s exclusion of Chinese citizens from space flights and to praise China’s own accomplishments.
A commenter using the name Hanhaihuangsha wrote on the microblog site Sina Weibo: “The company allows anyone who pays to board its spaceship, except for Chinese.”
Wangkang16 wrote: “China has the most reliable space technology, which is achieved by a huge amount of money.”
Meanwhile, some Chinese are intent on developing a homegrown space program for civilian use, including tourism.
“No matter how China is progressing in space, I have always had a personal interest in it,” said Hu Zhenyu, 21, a recent graduate of South China University of Technology in Guangzhou.
Earlier this year, Mr. Hu registered China’s first private rocket company, Link Space. His immediate plan is to develop rockets for scientific research, and he hopes to launch an unmanned rocket within a year. In the long term, he said, he hopes to have the technology to carry tourists into space.
Fu Song, a professor at the School of Aerospace Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said that recent successes in China’s government space program had kindled interest in the wider possibilities of space travel.
“When Armstrong walked on the moon, it was a first for mankind,” Mr. Fu said. “Now everyone knows you can go to space. It’s just a question of whether you want to go.”