Human spaceflight as a commercial service

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Selling seats. The first paying visitor to orbit was Dennis Tito, who flew to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz in April 2001 for a reported twenty million dollars; the market then lay dormant for most of two decades. It reopened along two very different lines. Suborbital flights — Blue Origin's New Shepard and Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, both first flying crews in July 2021 — offer a few minutes of weightlessness above the recognised boundary of space, at prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and with flight rates measured in a handful per year. Orbital flights are a different product entirely: the privately funded Inspiration4 mission in September 2021 flew four private citizens for three days without a professional astronaut aboard, Axiom Space has flown a series of commercial crews to the ISS, and the Polaris Dawn mission in September 2024 conducted the first spacewalk by a non-government crew. Total human spaceflight revenue remains small in space-economy terms, and its main significance so far is that it has made private crewed flight ordinary enough to be regulated as a service rather than treated as an experiment. Not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.