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This paper aims to briefly review the history and future expectations for space tourism.

Historical review.

After a series of successes in space travel, culminating by the Apollo 11 Moon landings in 1969, governmental efforts at space travel stalled. In the early twenty-first century, private entrepreneurs inspired new life into space travel and tourism, offering commercial suborbital trips, but none have as yet actually taken place. However, despite impediments, a significant expansion of space travel and tourism is expected to occur in the course of the twenty-first century.

The paper offers a synoptic view of past and projected future developments in space travel and tourism.

New technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), have helped us begin to take our first steps off Earth and into outer space. But conflicts inevitably will arise and, in the absence of settled governance, may be resolved by force, as is typical for new frontiers. But the terrestrial assumptions behind the ethics of war will need to be rethought when the context radically changes, and both the environment of space and the advent of robotic warfighters with superhuman capabilities will constitute such a radical change. This essay examines how new autonomous technologies, especially dual-use technologies, and the challenges to human existence in space will force us to rethink the ethics of war, both from space to Earth, and in space itself.

New Space activities offer benefits for human progress and life beyond the Earth. However, there is a risk that the New Space Economy may develop according to an anthropocentric mindset favouring human progress and survival at the expense of all other species and the environment. This mindset raises concerns over the social and environmental impacts of space activities and the accountability of space actors. This research article explores the accountability of space actors by presenting a pluralistic accountability framework to understand, inspire and change accountability in the New Space Economy. This study also identifies future research opportunities.

This paper is a reflective and normative essay. The arguments are developed using contemporary multidisciplinary academic literature, publicly available evidence and examples. Further, the authors use Dillard and Vinnari's accountability framework to examine a pluralistic accountability system for space businesses.

The New Space Economy requires public and private entities to embrace hybrid and pluralistic accountability for their social and environmental impacts. A new way of seeing the relationship between human life, the Earth and celestial space is needed. Accounting language is used to mirror and mobilise broader forms of responsibility in those involved in space.

This paper responds to the AAAJ's special issue call for examining how accountability can be ensured in the New Space Age. The space activities businesses conduct, and the anthropocentric view inspiring their race toward space is concerning. Hence, the authors advocate the need for rethinking accountability between humans and nature. The paper contributes to fostering the debate on social and environmental accounting and the accountability of space actors in the New Space Economy. To this end, the authors use a pluralistic accountability framework to help understand how the New Space Economy can face the risks emanating from its anthropocentric mindset.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of past experience in managing risk and technical innovation in NASA space programs with lessons learned for new unmanned space missions.

The paper examines past performance of space missions and abstracts the lessons learned for the efficient development of cost‐effective space missions.

The paper finds that large organizations build and internalize a culture at odds with risk taking and the rapid deployment of innovative solutions. Actualized management goals are often at odds with the issues that determine or insure the long‐term survival of an organization. A key issue is the management of knowledge within that system: the extrinsic knowledge of the technologies as well as the intrinsic knowledge associated with the perception and acceptance of risk.

Innovation can be seen as being dangerous to the organization. That perception must be managed. The NASA culture that is applicable to human spaceflight may not serve the community or the organization as well when applied to unmanned missions.

The paper provides a simplified and brief perspective on the issues inherent in managing a change in culture in an organization that has a highly public mission.

While the NASA “faster, better, cheaper” program has been considered elsewhere, this paper focuses on the lessons that are applicable to the management of space missions and the development of new, cost‐effective programs. These lessons retain their value, as the new administrator Michael D. Griffin attempts to manage the transition of NASA from an organization that has been in maintenance mode to one that must embrace innovation and stay within a highly constrained funding profile.