We had a great February meeting where we had a number of new people attend.  The focus was on Space Tourism – Private citizens paying to go to space.
The Economist predicts that 2018 will be a transformational year for Space Tourism.  There are seven people that have paid to travel to the International Space Station, all facilitated by Space Adventures.

1. Dennis Tito
2. Mark Shuttleworth
3. Gregory Olsen
4. Anousheh Ansari
5. Charles Simonyi
6. Richard Garriott
7. Guy Laliberté

Attendees were given several questions to answer:

1. How many private citizens have gone to the international space station?
2. Who was the first one?
3. Who was the last one?
4. Who went twice?
5. Which ones live in Texas?
6. How many were men? How many women?
7. How many Americans?

There was a description of each space tourist around the meeting area to help answer these questions.

We also had pizza.  (Papa John’s this time 🙂 )

We had a brief presentation on space tourism:

We also discussed how Space for Humanity (http://www.SpaceForHumanity.org) is offering the opportunity for 18+ every-day citizens to go on such flights.

We talked about the High School Astronaut program to sponsor one high school student to go on a zero g flight in September:

Read the latest news stories on Space.com: https://www.space.com/topics/space-tourism

Wikipedia has a great article about Space Tourism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism

SpaceX plans to send two tourist around the moon: http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-crewed-dragon-spacecraft-beyond-moon-next-year