On Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:44:22 GMT, (Derek Lyons)
wrote:

(Henry Spencer) wrote:

In article . com,

Thrill flights have the large advantage that you can -- in fact, with the
current state of the art, you must -- bill them as high-risk adventures,
on a par with climbing Everest, which are quite likely to kill some of the
participants. (Something like 20% of Everest climbers don't come back.)

Actually, the historical record is ~9% and the modern (post-1990,
commercial rather than exploratory) rate is ~4.5%. Some of the
tougher and less developed peaks do still come close to 20%.


I keep pondering on the Everest statistics - and can't ultimately
decide what they mean WRT orbital tourism. The Everest market is
aimed (largely) at experienced individuals who *already* risk their
lives for fun. The orbital tourism market is (theoretically) aimed at
the average Joe.

Aimed by whom, and in which theory?

Certainly when e.g. CNN does a story on SpaceShip One, it turns into
"Average Joes In Spaaace!". Because, it is not just theory that CNN's
target audience, is the Average Joe.

But I don't think I've ever seen a market study or a business plan for
space tourism, that even theorizes that people are going to make money
selling tourist flights to the Average Joe any time soon. Certainly
not *orbital* flights, given the prices they are going to have to
charge.


The target audience for near- and mid-term space tourism, and for
orbital space tourism anywhere this side of nigh-SFnal handwaving,
is pretty specifically people who are at least a standard deviation
out along the Wealthy, Thrill-Seeker, and/or Space Nut axes. Maybe
more than one standard deviation, though hopefully not quite so far
out as the Everest crowd.

That's OK. There are an awful lot of rich people in the world, an
awful lot of thrill-seekers, and it looks like rather more in the
way of space nuts than one might have imagined. If we can squeeze
the overlap for megabucks to develop a new industry, we'll do OK
even if we can't tap into the Average Joe market for another couple
generations.

We probably can't afford to kill 4.5% of them, of course. We might
be able to get away with 0.45%, but I wouldn't want to test that if
I could help it.


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