Suborbital Space Tour Listed on Trip.com for $973,000

A Chinese travel company called Trip.com is now selling a six-day space trip for about $973,000. The package lets paying customers ride a spacecraft into suborbital space — high enough to see the curve of the Earth. The trip is offered through Trip.com's luxury travel branch, HHtravel, together with an American spaceflight company called Virgin Galactic. It is one of the most expensive travel packages ever listed on a Chinese website.

The package includes three days of training at Spaceport America, a launch facility near Las Cruces, New Mexico. During training, passengers prepare their bodies and minds for the conditions of spaceflight. On the fifth day of the trip, they board Virgin Galactic's spacecraft for a 90-minute ride into suborbital space. For a few thrilling minutes during that flight, passengers experience weightlessness — the feeling of floating — and can see the curved edge of the Earth below them.

The price of the package covers quite a lot, but not everything. Travelers get preflight training, ground transportation, luxury hotel stays in the United States, custom-made spacesuits, and a video of their flight as a keepsake. However, they must pay extra for their own plane tickets to the U.S., special spaceflight insurance, and travel visas. That means the total cost could be even higher than the listed price.

The listing has sparked a lot of conversation on Chinese social media. People are debating whether it is reasonable to spend that much money on a short trip to space. Tourism expert Wei Changren explained that only a very small group of people in the world could ever consider buying such a package. He said buyers would need to be in excellent physical health, comfortable taking big risks, and extremely wealthy.

Not everyone who dreams of going sees it as completely out of reach. A Beijing man named Li Xing, who loves extreme sports, said the trip sounds like an incredible adventure for regular people who have never trained as astronauts. But he admitted the price is simply too high for almost anyone. "If I were rich enough, I would register for the trip, but it's much too expensive for me," he said.

Some experts believe space tourism could become more affordable in the future. A Beijing tech company called InterstellOr has already announced plans to launch its own suborbital space trips around 2028. A senior manager there said passengers will not need to meet the same strict health standards as professional astronauts. The Chinese government is also supporting the space tourism industry with a three-year action plan released in 2025. Virgin Galactic flew its first paying customers on June 29, 2023, and has now carried 23 paying passengers in total.