juliensimon/space-tourism-flights

Commercial Spaceflight Passengers

Credit: NASA

Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face.

Dataset description

Catalog of commercial spaceflight passengers — the individuals who have flown to space on tickets purchased from private spaceflight companies. Covers suborbital flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, orbital missions by SpaceX, Axiom Space, and the Space Adventures ISS visits arranged via Russian Soyuz, from 2001 to the present.

Space tourism began in April 2001 when American businessman Dennis Tito paid the Russian space agency approximately $20 million for a Soyuz ride to the International Space Station — the first time a private citizen purchased a seat to orbit Earth. Over the following two decades, seven more paying tourists visited the ISS through Space Adventures before the program was suspended and later revived. The commercial era accelerated in 2021 when Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin both conducted their first crewed commercial flights, SpaceX launched the all-civilian Inspiration4 mission to orbit, and Axiom Space began the first in a series of private ISS expeditions.

Each row in this dataset represents one passenger on one flight. The trajectory_type field distinguishes suborbital hops (reaching space but returning within minutes) from orbital flights (completing at least one revolution of the Earth). The is_paying_tourist field separates revenue-generating seats from operational crew members who may fly on the same vehicles in a professional capacity. The duration_hours and max_altitude_km columns capture the physical scope of each mission.

This dataset is useful for demographic analysis of the commercial spaceflight industry, tracking the growth in flight frequency and operator diversity, and studying the expanding accessibility of space travel. It complements the astronaut-database dataset, which covers government-trained astronauts and cosmonauts.

This dataset is suitable for tabular classification tasks.

Schema

Column	Type	Description	Sample	Null %
flight_name	string	Official mission name (e.g., 'Blue Origin NS-18', 'SpaceX Inspiration4', 'VSS Unity VF-01'); used as the primary grouping key for per-flight analysis	Soyuz TM-32	0.0%
flight_date	str	Launch date in UTC (YYYY-MM-DD); null if unconfirmed	2001-04-28	0.0%
operator	string	Commercial spaceflight company that operated the vehicle (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Space Adventures, Axiom Space)	Space Adventures	0.0%
vehicle	string	Spacecraft name (e.g., 'VSS Unity', 'New Shepard', 'Crew Dragon Resilience'); identifies the vehicle within the operator's fleet	Soyuz TM-32	0.0%
trajectory_type	string	'suborbital' for flights that reach space but do not complete an orbit (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin); 'orbital' for flights that complete at least one Earth orbit (SpaceX, Axiom, Soyuz via Space Adventures)	orbital	0.0%
passenger_name	string	Full name of the commercial passenger	Dennis Tito	0.0%
passenger_nationality	string	Passenger's nationality (English label, e.g., 'American', 'Japanese')	American	0.0%
passenger_birth_year	Int64	Year of birth of the passenger; used for age-at-flight analysis	1940	0.0%
passenger_occupation	string	Primary professional occupation outside aerospace (e.g., 'entrepreneur', 'actor', 'physician', 'investor', 'engineer'); describes their civilian background	businessman	0.0%
is_paying_tourist	boolean	True if this passenger purchased a commercial seat; False for pilots, mission specialists with operational roles, or science crew on cost-reimbursement arrangements	True	0.0%
duration_hours	float64	Approximate total flight duration in hours from launch to landing; suborbital: ~0.17 h (10 min); orbital: 72-200+ h depending on mission profile	188.0	0.0%
max_altitude_km	int64	Maximum altitude above sea level reached during the mission (km); Kármán line (100 km) for suborbital; ISS orbit (~410 km) for orbital; Polaris Dawn (1400 km)	400	0.0%

Quick stats

• 85 passenger-flight records
• 78 unique individuals who have flown commercially to space
• 27 unique flights
• 63 paying tourist seats
• By operator: Blue Origin (37), Axiom Space (16), Virgin Galactic (15), Space Adventures (9), SpaceX (8)
• By trajectory: orbital (33), suborbital (52)
• Youngest at flight: Oliver Daemen (19 years old)
• Oldest at flight: Ed Dwight (91 years old)

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/space-tourism-flights", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

from datasets import load_dataset
import pandas as pd

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/space-tourism-flights", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()
df["flight_date"] = pd.to_datetime(df["flight_date"])

# Cumulative passengers over time
cumulative = df.drop_duplicates("passenger_name").sort_values("flight_date")
cumulative["cumulative_passengers"] = range(1, len(cumulative) + 1)
cumulative.plot(x="flight_date", y="cumulative_passengers",
                title="Cumulative Commercial Space Passengers Over Time")

# Breakdown by operator
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
df.groupby("operator")["passenger_name"].nunique().sort_values().plot.barh()
plt.xlabel("Unique Passengers")
plt.title("Commercial Space Passengers by Operator")
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

# Suborbital vs orbital
print(df.groupby("trajectory_type")["passenger_name"].nunique())

Data source

https://www.wikidata.org/

Update schedule

Monthly on the 1st at 06:00 UTC

Related datasets

• juliensimon/astronaut-database

• juliensimon/spacex-launches

• juliensimon/blue-origin-launches

• juliensimon/artemis-ii

• juliensimon/astronauts

• juliensimon/cassini

• juliensimon/chemcam

If you find this dataset useful, please consider giving it a like on Hugging Face. It helps others discover it.

About the author

Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.

Citation

@dataset{space_tourism_flights,
  title = {Commercial Spaceflight Passengers},
  author = {juliensimon},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/space-tourism-flights},
  publisher = {Hugging Face}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0