“One of the remaining challenges is getting licenses from the FAA Office of Space Transportation,” Stallmer told Private Wealth. “The process is long and extremely detailed, so companies need to establish communications with the office early on to ensure that their commercial operations can start.”
Ryan Hodson, who is eyeing space travel as an option in the future, feel it's too early to plan for such a trip.
“It’s easier to get to outer space than Antartica from America, but it’s not as safe,” said Hodson, who manages his family’s Wall Street fortune within a family office.
Hodson’s position is based on the crash of a Virgin Galactic commercial test flight over the Mojave Desert in California last year. But that hasn’t stopped Virgin Galactic from preparing travel agents.
Stewart Lieberman is an accredited space agent, which means he is certified by Virgin Galactic to sell space tourism travel packages, but only to travelers between the ages of 18 and 80 years old who qualify.
“You have to be medically fit and cleared by a doctor,” said Lieberman, who completed five days of Virgin Galactic training with other travel agents at the Kennedy Space Center in New Mexico. “You can’t just board the spaceship [just because] you have the money to pay for it.”
That’s because the two-hour round-trip flight involves traveling 63 miles away from Earth and circling it for three hours before gliding back to planet.
“After going up, you will accelerate at a fast pace and some people might black out because of the intense pressure that happens for a couple of minutes,” said Lieberman, who works as a travel agent with Protravel International.