THE ASGARDIA PROJECT: AN INTERSECTION BETWEEN SPACE TOURISM AND SMART CITY

Abstract

Space tourism is predicted to be the next best thing. Some private companies, such as Virgin Galactic and SpaceX, are in race to send billionaires to outer space either for leisure or business purposes. The Asgardia project which was founded in 2016 has become an international sensation. In 2019, the Asgardia gathered over 1,000,000 people from more than 200 countries of which slightly over 18,000 registered members have accepted its constituents. This research aims to investigate sustainability factors which motivate people to travel or migrate to outer space. While studies about sustainable and smart cities are getting more spotlight in recent years, very few studies in this topic made a radical leap by closely examining a radical model of the smart city concept, such as Asgardia. We took a random sampling of 307 members of the Asgardia community. We employed SEM analysis in order to test the hypotheses. The results of this study reveal that there are three factors which are appealing to space tourism enthusiasts, namely Smart Economy, Smart Governance and Smart Mobility. This study is expected to add novelty in the smart city literature as well as to fill the gap in the current conceptualization of smart cities. Moreover, the findings are expected to offer a valuable insight for business practitioners of smart city and space tourism.