Any voyage in space. Space travel normally refers to crewed journeys and is often used to describe space trips by ordinary citizens. Russia was the first country to offer space tourism and an opportunity to visit the International Space Station; its first space tourist was Dennis Tito, a 60-year-old financier from California, who paid US$20 million to the Russians to visit the ISS during April 2001. Civilians have visited space since the 1980s, including three US congressmen, a Japanese journalist, a Russian bureaucrat, and a Ukrainian. NASA's ‘citizen-passenger programme’ ended after Christa McAuliffe, a teacher, died in the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986.

Among companies developing plans for hotels in space are DaimlerChrysler, Hilton, and Shimizu. In 1998, Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon (1969), established the non-profit ShareSpace Foundation to promote space tourism. Virgin Galactic, run by Richard Branson, and Space Adventures, the US company that helped Dennis Tito broker his Russian flight, have already booked more than 300 reservations for sub-orbital flights. A test flight, VSS Enterprise, was destroyed in a test flight in 2014.

To date the only orbital space tourism has been performed by the Russian Space Agency. Roscosmos stopped the programme due to an increase in expedition crews, leaving no room for paying tourists. Recently, Roscosmos has indicated that it plans to restart its space tourism program as early as 2018. Presently, suborbital flights are offered by aerospace companies such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.