For three long years, two companies have dueled to dominate the nascent market for space tourism. But that's about to change.

2021 featured inaugural space launches from both publicly traded Virgin Galactic (SPCE -1.85%) and privately held Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin, each of which successfully delivered private space tourists to the edge of space (roughly 60 miles up) and then brought them home safely again. To date, Virgin Galactic has now conducted a total of seven "Galactic" commercial flights carrying paying space tourists on its Unity spaceplane. Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital rocket has carried space tourists eight times.

That's great and all, but here's the thing: The actual time in space that both of these companies provided their customers amounted to a few minutes at most. When you're paying Virgin Galactic $250,000, $450,000, or even $900,000 for a space ticket, that's not a lot of bang for your buck. And while Blue Origin still isn't advertising its prices publicly, Quartz.com reported in 2022 that one ticket broker paid $2,575,000 for a pair of tickets on one recent Blue Origin flight. At nearly $1.3 million apiece, that's even more expensive.

Could it even be too expensive?

SpaceX and space tourism

Two years ago, as the space tourism race was just revving up, I explained how a gigantic Starship rocket from SpaceX, capable of carrying 100 passengers at a time and launching for $10 million per trip, threatened to disrupt this latest space race before it even really got started. A $10 million launch cost, divided by 100 space tourists, implied that SpaceX could one day be able to offer a per-ticket price of $100,000 and undercut prices being charged by both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin.

SpaceX is not there yet, but it does look like that's the direction it's headed.

Consider: Just last week SpaceX conducted a successful space tourism flight, Polaris Dawn, in which four non-NASA astronauts flew to an orbit 450 miles above Earth (3 times the height of the International Space Station) and there conducted the first-ever space tourism spacewalk. Two astronauts, pilot and Polaris Dawn sponsor Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, exited their Crew Dragon space capsule wearing SpaceX-built spacesuits, each spending about 10 minutes outside the spacecraft.

Later, after completing their five-day mission, the entire crew returned to Earth to splash down in the ocean.

Polaris Dawn's price tag

Admittedly, the cost of the Polaris Dawn mission isn't even in the same ballpark as the prices Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are charging for their space tourist tickets. In a recent report on Commercial Crew missions to the ISS, Payload Space calculated that SpaceX is charging about $72 million per seat for NASA astronauts (up from $55 million per seat in 2019). A recent Forbes magazine article furthermore put the price of Crew Dragon seats charged to Axiom Space at roughly $41.9 million.

Even at the low end of that range, therefore, SpaceX charges a lot more for its space tourism flights than do either Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin.

Or does it?

Space tourism math

Consider: The lowest advertised price for space tourism seats by Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin is $250,000. Divided by even a generous 10 minutes in space, that works out to a per-minute cost of $25,000 per minute.

In contrast, assume SpaceX charged the NASA rate of $72 million per seat on Polaris Dawn, a mission that stretched five days in length, or 7,200 minutes. I don't even need a calculator to figure out the per-minute cost on that one. It's $10,000 per minute, per passenger, a 60% discount to what Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are charging!

And here's another fact would-be investors in Virgin Galactic (or in any future Blue Origin IPO) need to consider: SpaceX is just getting started, and its Crew Dragon is only carrying four passengers per flight. Versus a rated capacity of seven, this made Polaris Dawn relatively more expensive per seat than it absolutely needs to be to cover the cost of a Falcon 9 rocket launch. SpaceX could charge less on future flights carrying more passengers. It could also offer longer flights, giving space tourists more bang for their buck -- or it could do both.

Meanwhile, the math will shift even more in SpaceX's favor as it works out the bugs in Starliner, and approaches an ultimate goal of being able to send 100 passengers to space at a time, at a cost measured in thousands of dollars per ticket, rather than millions.

Space tourism may not be SpaceX's most important goal in spaceflight. But the numbers tell me it's still a market SpaceX can dominate if it wants to.