Author Bios (50 Words for each Author)

Dr. Jingning Ao studies strategic communication, space tourism and commercialization. She is working on her second Ph.D. in strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Rudy Dunlap is an associate professor in the Department of Health and Human Performance at Middle Tennessee State University. His research has generally addressed leisure as a socio-cultural context in which community development and social changes take place. Dr. Dunlap is a co-editor of the journal, Leisure Sciences.

Dr. Nicky Wu studies tourist behaviors, natural resource planning and management, and the application of technology, such as GIS and VR. She has been actively involved in research and planning projects including trail and waterway use, environmental policy and management issues, and Resource Management Plans for state parks and public land.

Abstract (150 Words)

As SpaceX and other commercial entities enter the space industry, space travel for a broader audience will become more feasible. Since the early 1990s, tourism study has witnessed an ongoing conversation on space tourism, which mainly covers motivations of potential space tourists and their pricing expectations. This study takes a novel perspective by framing astronauts’ direct experiences as inputs to build a conceptual model of space travel experience. Through a combination of traditional qualitative analysis and computation-based linguistic analysis on 19,114 Tweets (2008-2018) posted by 36 astronauts, this study aims to address an important theoretical void: When people travel to outer space, what leisure experiences attached to orbital space travel could they have? We propose “amateur astronaut” as a transiting title from astronauts to space tourists, and suggest that space travel experience brings an overview effect as our core theoretical contributions of touristic attraction.

Download

Share

COinS
 

The future is now: A mixed-methods analysis of astronauts' experience associate with space travel

As SpaceX and other commercial entities enter the space industry, space travel for a broader audience will become more feasible. Since the early 1990s, tourism study has witnessed an ongoing conversation on space tourism, which mainly covers motivations of potential space tourists and their pricing expectations. This study takes a novel perspective by framing astronauts’ direct experiences as inputs to build a conceptual model of space travel experience. Through a combination of traditional qualitative analysis and computation-based linguistic analysis on 19,114 Tweets (2008-2018) posted by 36 astronauts, this study aims to address an important theoretical void: When people travel to outer space, what leisure experiences attached to orbital space travel could they have? We propose “amateur astronaut” as a transiting title from astronauts to space tourists, and suggest that space travel experience brings an overview effect as our core theoretical contributions of touristic attraction.