Space tourism gets boost from NASA

THE US NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION announced on Friday that it will allow private citizens to stay on the International Space Station. The bucket-list trip is likely to be prohibitively expensive for most tourists, though, as a round-trip ticket costs about $58 million. Nevertheless, there are those who can afford it and it could prove a good revenue stream for NASA, which spends billions of dollars operating the space station with Russia. China Daily writer Zhang Zhouxiang comments:

Actually, this is just the latest initiative in the commercialization of space. In 1957, Sputnik, the first man-made satellite entered orbit. Seven years later, COMSAT Corporation's Intelsat I, or Early Bird as it was known, became the first commercial satellite. In the decades that followed, over 4,000 man-made satellites have been sent into orbit, of which quite a high percentage serve commercial purposes such as communications.

These satellites have changed people's lives, and the commercial companies that have launched and run them have not only made money, they have also further sharpened humankind's aerospace technology.