John “JV” Venable, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force is a senior research fellow for defense policy at Heritage.

By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 2004, in response to a prize competition initiated in the late 1990s, a privately funded spacecraft, named SpaceShipOne, became the first of its kind to carry human beings (in this case, test pilots) on such flights. One variant of space tourism is to take fare-paying passengers to the edge of space—generally set at 100 km (62 miles) altitude—for brief suborbital flights that offer a few minutes of weightlessness and a broad view of Earth.

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