Billionaire explorer club: from the Titanic to the International Space Station and the summit of Everest

Although humans have explored much of the planet and its surroundings, certain pockets remain inaccessible to all but the wealthiest.

For $100 million, individuals can pay to orbit the moon in a Russian spacecraft, and for $20 million, they can spend a week on the International Space Station (ISS).

Those who are more conservative can spend half a million dollars to fly to the very beginning of space or $250,000 to visit the depths of the planet’s oceans.

In recent decades, new industries have been tailor-made for billionaire tourists, developed by some of the most renowned capitalists, including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk.

“Rich guys, they like rocketships,” Donald Trump said at a 2018 cabinet meeting about private investment in space. ‘Fine. That’s better than us paying for it.’

Those ‘guys’ also like submarines. Branson, who founded Virgin Galactic to take individuals to space, founded Virgin Oceanic in 2014 to visit the planet’s deepest waters.

British billionaire Hamish Harding, aboard the submarine that disappeared this weekend while touring the Titanic shipwreck, had also been to the Mariana Trench in 2021 and traveled into space a year later with Blue Origin.

Branson and Bezos founded Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin respectively. Bezos’ Blue Origin has taken paying customers to the limits of space in its New Shepard capsule, where they feel a few minutes of weightlessness and return.

While Blue Origin is not disclosing the price of those tickets, its direct competitor, Virgin Galactic, is currently selling seats for $450,000.

But other lesser-known companies have been trading for decades and have put billionaires not only in orbit, but even on trips to the ISS.

The advent of space tourism has been linked to Dennis Tito, an American investment manager, who in 2001 reportedly paid $20 million for a seven-day trip to the ISS.

The operation was the result of a deal between Russian company MirCorp and US-based Space Adventures Ltd and was seen as a way to raise money to fund the upkeep of the aging outpost.

It was established in 1998 and has since brought a number of very high net worth individuals to the station.

Since 2007, it has been offering a trip around the moon on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for $100 million, which will “take you within a few hundred miles of the lunar surface.”

“It’s not just about working for the government or being a fighter pilot or NASA, it’s now available to you and me,” said chairman Eric Anderson in a video promoting his travels to the ISS last year.

“We’ve changed what it means to be an astronaut. Space Adventures is the original space experience company that offers individuals the opportunity to fly to space,” he added.

His clients include Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, Microsoft software engineer Charles Simonyi, and computer game developer Richard Garriott.

It organized the flight of Japanese billionaire and fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawato to the ISS in December 2021.

“I’m so curious, “What’s life like in space?” So I intend to find out for myself and share it with the world,” Maezawa said in a statement earlier that year. Within months of completing that journey, he said he would also travel to the Mariana Trench.

In December, the 47-year-old announced he would make a trip around the moon sometime this year with Musk’s rocket and satellite company SpaceX, making him the first private passenger on a SpaceX lunar mission.

Space tourism has also become a way to fund expensive and unprofitable travel to space, in the hope that research and technological advancements will eventually reduce costs.

Mike Gold, an associate administrator for Space Policy and Partnerships at NASA, told The Washington Post in 2018 that such sponsorships are helpful.

“As in the early days of aviation, with barnstorming, these initial activities will help build the infrastructure and foundation that can lead to future innovations that we frankly can’t envision at this point,” he said.

NASA’s website suggests that reaching low-Earth orbit is akin to climbing Everest — which has become increasingly accessible over the years, but was once a privilege reserved only for the particularly wealthy.

Between the early 1900s and the 1970s, attempts to climb Everest were extremely expensive and rare – only the skilled and determined climbers made the effort.

From the 1990s, climbing Everest became increasingly commercialized and costs were drastically reduced. In recent decades, a climber can spend between $30,000 and $100,000 climbing the world’s tallest mountain.

One of Everest’s most famous commercial climbs was documented by the journalist Jon Krakauer, who convinced his employer, Outside Magazine, to fund a summit attempt in 1996 that he would write about.

“The truth is I knew better, but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was complicit in the deaths of good people, something that will probably remain on my conscience for a very long time,” he concluded in the introduction to a memoir.

Above 7,500 meters, in what is known as the mountain’s death zone, commercial climbers crowded the mountain and traffic prevented climbers from descending when a storm hit, killing eight climbers.

“Attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility,” he wrote in the introduction to a memoir.

The number of commercial ascents of Everest went from nearly zero in 1970 to about 600 in 2019, according to a compilation of records for expeditions to the Himalayas. The Himalayas in numbers.

A famous photo taken on Everest in 2019 showed a number of commercial climber tourists lined up along a trail near the summit.

In 2014, a Google executive, Alan Eustace, made headlines after popping out of a balloon near the top of the stratosphere. He was lifted in a space suit to an altitude of about 40,000 feet by a balloon filled with helium.

After jumping, he spent about 15 minutes falling to earth equipped with a parachute, a jump for which he broke a Guinness World Record.

Texan billionaire Jim Clark spent more than $15 million on a 100-foot yacht known as the Comanche in hopes of building “the fastest boat ever.”

Plans by billionaires to conquer unknown territories have been met with much criticism.

In 2021, Prince William told the BBC that the richest people shouldn’t be focused on exploration.

“We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds determined to try and fix this planet, not find the next place to live,” he said.

‘[It] is really very crucial to focus on this [planet] instead of giving up and going into space to come up with solutions for the future.’

Similarly, Bill Gates has attacked Elon Musk for investing his money in missiles and not vaccines. He told the BBC earlier this year: ‘It’s actually quite expensive to go to Mars. You can buy measles vaccines and save lives for $1,000 per life saved.”