Space, the final frontier, and one that could soon become a destination of choice for holidaymakers

as the tourism Space race continues to heat up between Branson, Musk and Bezos.

Britain’s first Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) travel agent, Butter, has taken a look at the current cost of a zero-gravity holiday and how it compares to a good old fashioned trip within the Earth’s atmosphere.

After a recent successful test flight, Richard Branson has reopened ticket sales for his commercial

Space flight endeavours, ramping the price of a ticket on Virgin Galactic up to £324,000. That works out at an estimated £2,160 per minute for the two and a half hour flight to Space and back.

Space flight costs vs domestic travel

To put that into perspective, a similar flight time from London to Barcelona will cost you just £53 or 38 pence a minute, meaning a flight on Virgin Galactic comes in at 611,221% more!

Blue Origin, the Space tourism venture by Jeff Bezos previously sold a ticket at auction for £28m. However, it’s expected but unconfirmed that an actual ticket will only cost you the bargain price of between $200-$300,000.

Even at the lower price threshold, that’s still £144,000 but with the flight itself thought to last approximately 11 minutes, that’s an eye-watering £13,091 per minute.

Space stay costs vs earth hotels and flights

But offering a flight alone is unlikely to make Space the next tourist hotspot and Musk’s Space X and Axiom has ambitions of colonizing Mars, while currently offering a 10 day stay on the International Space Station. The bad news is that it will set you back around £39.5m, 3.3m% more than the cost of a 10 day holiday to Singapore.

Orion Span also has ambitions of opening a Space hotel with a 12-day round trip coming in at more than £6.8m per person – 569,252% more expensive than a 12 day holiday to Singapore.

Timothy Davis, Co-Founder and CEO of Butter, commented:

“It seems quite strange to be talking about the potential of Space as an actual tourism destination of choice, even stranger still considering you can’t even travel to Europe at the moment without COVID causing problems.

However, for those with extremely deep pockets, a holiday to Space could soon be a very real reality and only time will tell where we’ll find ourselves in the next decade. The evolution of air travel has demonstrated how new methods of travel can be extremely costly to start with. But as more suppliers join the race, providing greater choice for the consumer while lowering operational costs via advancements in technology, affordability can increase dramatically.

So who knows, it might not be too long before we’re swapping a week in the Spanish sun for a stay under the two moons of Mars. But for the meantime, even spreading the cost of a trip to Space interest-free via Butter is still going to be a tad pricey.”