Until recently, space travel was a concern of nations investing in prestigious exploratory projects or in launching satellites. Now, several operators offer space travel for private persons, or at least promise to organize such trips on a regular basis in the near future, with falling costs. In their attempts to define and inhabit the prospective market for space tourism, these operators present particular visions of the future of space travel. In doing so, they develop particular accounts of what such trips entail, why they are exciting and important, and why people might need them. While some claim that space tourism is unviable and undesirable, others argue that human curiosity will not be stopped. The case of space tourism is a clear and urgent example of how needs and technology co-evolve, a theme in the MUSTS research programme.

A group of students from five different faculties of Maastricht University are studying how to assess the rise of space tourism. They are part of the Honours Plus program, an excellence programme for second-year bachelor students. The group investigates the dynamics of space tourism and its discourses of needs, rights, progress, freedom and imagination. The Honours Plus students attend workshops, develop a videoblog, and write a report as an interdisciplinary team assignment. Data are drawn from newspaper articles, websites of operators, popular books on space travel and governmental documents. In addition the students will discover how interdisciplinarity may work: how human imagination meets technical challenges, how economic problems have historical roots, and how governance issues face psychological drivers.

Coordinator: Harro van Lente

This course ties in with the research conducted in the Maastricht University Science, Technology and Society Studies research programme.