Approximately 120 private civilians have now flown to space aboard commercial rockets — roughly one-sixth of all the human beings who have ever left Earth — and the rate at which citizens are reaching space is now accelerating faster than the rate at which national space programs are sending professional astronauts

Approximately 120 private civilians have now flown to space aboard commercial rockets — roughly one-sixth of all the human beings who have ever left Earth — and the rate at which citizens are reaching space is now accelerating faster than the rate at which national space programs are sending professional astronauts

For the first forty years of human spaceflight, getting into space required being a professional astronaut or cosmonaut. The selection processes were intensely competitive, the training programmes took years, the candidates were chosen from elite military pilot or scientific backgrounds, and the small number of people who eventually made it through the filtering and onto a launch vehicle were essentially all employees of the few national space a…