Originally published 2021-11-05.
In October 2021, the space tourism company Space Adventures confirmed that it was no longer planning a private orbital flight on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The company had marketed the trip to wealthy prospective customers but did not sign up a crew, and its reservation with SpaceX expired. Spokesperson Stacey Tearne told SpaceNews that "the mix of price, timing and experience wasn't right" at that moment, and that the company hoped to revisit the idea later.
The announcement surprised many people because it came only weeks after Inspiration4, the first all-civilian orbital mission, had flown on the same type of spacecraft. Here is what Space Adventures had planned, why the flight did not go ahead, what the company did instead, and how private spaceflight developed in the years that followed.
What the Crew Dragon mission was meant to be
Space Adventures announced its agreement with SpaceX in February 2020. The plan was ambitious: up to four paying passengers would launch from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and spend up to five days in orbit. Unlike earlier tourist trips, the capsule would not visit the International Space Station. Instead it would climb to an unusually high orbit, roughly twice the altitude of the ISS, with a highest point above 1,000 km.
The original target window ran from late 2021 to mid-2022. The ticket price was never officially published. Company president Tom Shelley later explained that the SpaceX reservation had simply lapsed without a crew in place.
Why the flight did not happen
Three things worked against the mission, and the company's own explanation points to all of them.
Price. Orbital flights cost tens of millions of dollars per seat. For comparison, the Axiom Space mission Ax-1, which flew on a Crew Dragon to the ISS in 2022, was reported at about $55 million per seat. Only a tiny number of people in the world can, or want to, spend that much on a single trip.
Timing. The offer was marketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel of every kind was disrupted and uncertainty was high. Booking a five-day trip to orbit with a fixed launch window is a big commitment in any year, and a harder one in 2020 and 2021.
Experience. Inspiration4 had already done much of what Space Adventures promised. It flew four private astronauts, with no professional astronaut on board, to about 585 km for nearly three days. A wealthy buyer who wanted to be first had lost that selling point, and other companies were offering ISS visits that came with a destination and a story to tell.
The early reporting that the company "could not find any passengers" is a simplification. Space Adventures said the mission was pitched to many prospective customers; none committed before the reservation expired. That is a statement about this particular product, not proof that demand for space tourism had disappeared.
Who Space Adventures is
Space Adventures was founded in 1998 by Eric C. Anderson and is based in northern Virginia. It became famous for arranging the first private trips to the International Space Station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Between 2001 and 2009 it flew seven paying customers on eight missions:
- Dennis Tito, 2001, reportedly for about $20 million
- Mark Shuttleworth, 2002
- Gregory Olsen, 2005
- Anousheh Ansari, 2006
- Charles Simonyi, 2007 and again in 2009
- Richard Garriott, 2008
- Guy Laliberté, 2009
After 2009, seats on Soyuz were needed for professional crews, because NASA's Space Shuttle retired in 2011 and the Soyuz became the only way to reach the ISS until Crew Dragon flew astronauts in 2020. That gap is why the company had no customer flights for more than a decade.
What Space Adventures did instead: Soyuz MS-20
While the Crew Dragon plan faded, the company's Soyuz business returned. On 8 December 2021, Soyuz MS-20 launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, his production assistant Yozo Hirano, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin as commander. Maezawa paid for both his own and Hirano's seats.
The crew spent about 12 days in space, docked at the ISS, and landed on 20 December 2021. It was the first Soyuz flight devoted entirely to space tourism, with a single professional cosmonaut on board. Space Adventures also announced a later Soyuz mission that would include a spacewalk by a private astronaut, planned for no earlier than 2023, but no customers were named.
How private spaceflight moved on
The cancelled mission did not slow the wider industry. 2021 alone saw Virgin Galactic carry passengers to the edge of space on 11 July and Blue Origin fly its New Shepard capsule with a crew on 20 July. Inspiration4 followed in September, raising more than $243 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
In 2022, Axiom Space's Ax-1 became the first all-private crew to visit the ISS. In September 2024, the Polaris Dawn mission reached about 1,400 km, an altitude record for a crewed flight in Earth orbit, and carried out the first private spacewalk. In April 2025, the Fram2 mission flew the first crew over Earth's poles. Several of these flights delivered exactly the kind of high, free-flying orbital trip Space Adventures had proposed, organised by the passengers themselves with SpaceX.
What the episode tells us about space tourism
The Space Adventures decision is a useful reminder to separate four stages that headlines often blur: an announcement, a signed contract, a named crew and an actual launch. Many proposed private missions stall at the first or second stage, often because of cost or timing rather than technology.
It also shows how the market has changed. In the 2000s, an agency such as Space Adventures acted as the middleman between rich customers and the Russian space programme. Today, wealthy individuals tend to work directly with launch providers, and companies like Axiom build complete mission packages around research, a station visit or a record. Space tourism did not fail in 2021; one product simply arrived at the wrong moment, at the wrong price, against strong competition.
Sources: SpaceNews: Space Adventures no longer planning Crew Dragon flight (2021) · Wikipedia: Space Adventures · Wikipedia: Soyuz MS-20 · Wikipedia: Inspiration4 · Wikipedia: Space tourism
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