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A Netnographic Research to Unveil the Leisure Experience

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A Netnographic Research to Unveil the Leisure Experience RIDE OF A LIFETIME: A NETNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH TO UNVEIL THE LEISURE EXPERIENCE ATTACHED TO ORBITAL SPACE TOURISM by Jingning Ao A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Human Performance Middle Tennessee State University August 2018 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Joey Gray, Chair Dr. I-Chun (Nicky) Wu Dr. William Compton ABSTRACT People tend to have different motivations when selecting a travel destination. While traveling to space becomes increasingly feasible as the technology advances, there is relatively few research communicates what people can experience about leisure travel in space. Understanding the leisure properties of space travel could potentially help the business development of space tourism. Therefore, the primary purpose of this study is to explore the following: When people travel to outer space, what properties of leisure experiences attached to orbital space tourism could potentially attract tourists? In this study, leisure perception serves as the theoretical foundation; the theory of a multi-phase experience provides an analytical tool to construct the experience of space tourism. A netnographic research method is applied to obtain authentic descriptions about space travel experience from the most popular Tweets posted by 36 NASA astronauts in Twitter. The selected 3,468 Tweets indicate that the public shows interests in both in-space and off-site experiences. Moreover, research findings highlight the trip to space as a dynamic and multi-phasic experience with its context. Specifically, the identified key patterns, including training, liftoff, in-space, reentry, and memory, are formed into five stages of orbital space travel. Each stage has its unforgettable experiences and unique leisure attributes. This study hopes to fill the gap in current academic literatures of space tourism, and lay the foundation for formulating marketing strategies for space tourism business. Therefore, people do not have to be fully competent as professional astronauts to desire space travel in the future. Instead, a space tourist as amateur astronaut can expect her space trip with multi-phasic leisure experiences as the ride of a lifetime. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY ................................................................................................... 1 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM .................................................................................................. 2 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY ........................................................................................................... 3 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY ................................................................................................... 4 DEFINITION OF TERMS ............................................................................................................. 7 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ..................................................................................................... 8 RESEARCH QUESTION .............................................................................................................. 9 LIMITATIONS ........................................................................................................................... 9 DELIMITATION ...................................................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................ 14 SPACE TOURISM FROM AN AVIATION PERSPECTIVE ................................................................ 14 SPACE TOURISM FROM A SPACEFLIGHT PERSPECTIVE ............................................................. 17 SPACE TOURISM FROM A TOURISM PERSPECTIVE .................................................................... 27 SPACE TOURISM FROM A LEISURE PERSPECTIVE ..................................................................... 46 CURRENT TRENDS OF SPACE TOURISM ................................................................................... 56 CHAPTER SUMMARY ............................................................................................................. 62 CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY ............................................................................... 64 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 64 JUSTIFICATION OF STUDIED POPULATION ............................................................................... 64 INSTRUMENTATION ............................................................................................................... 72 DATA COLLECTION ............................................................................................................... 77 DATA ANALYSIS ................................................................................................................... 80 iii CHAPTER SUMMARY ............................................................................................................. 81 CHAPTER FOUR: FINDINGS .............................................................................................. 83 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 83 TRAINING.............................................................................................................................. 84 LIFTOFF ................................................................................................................................ 88 IN-SPACE .............................................................................................................................. 96 REENTRY ............................................................................................................................ 132 MEMORY ............................................................................................................................ 136 CHAPTER SUMMARY ........................................................................................................... 145 CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSIONS ....................................................................................... 147 AVIATION AND LEISURE SPACE TRAVEL ................................................................................ 148 SPACEFLIGHT AND LEISURE SPACE TRAVEL........................................................................... 149 TOURISM AND LEISURE SPACE TRAVEL ................................................................................. 151 LEISURE AND SPACE TRAVEL................................................................................................ 156 FUTURE RESEARCH .............................................................................................................. 169 REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................... 171 IRB APPROVAL .................................................................................................................. 184 iv CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION “I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution.” —Wernher von Braun Background of the study A few decades ago, the last man walked on the moon. Have people lost interest in space since then? No. Human beings have never ceased imagining about the cosmos and space travel. Simply look at the science fiction films: space exploration movies were produced in every decade since the 1960s, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Black Hole (1979), Explorers (1985), Contact (1997), Solaris (2002), Prometheus (2012), Interstellar (2014), and The Martian (2015). In the movies, humanity leaves the earth and heads to the stars and beyond. Someday public space tourism may come true and push human desires out into the universe. Space is not an unlikely place any more since the first human orbited our planet in 1961. But, how long until people will travel in outer space for tourism? In 2001, the world’s first-ever space tourist, Dennis Tito funded his own trip into space for 7 days, 22 hours and orbited earth 128 times with a reported price of $20 million in total. In 2002, the world’s second space tourist, Mark Shuttleworth self-funded a space voyage for 9 days, 21 hours with similar costs as Tito. Both followed extensive astronaut training and spent an extremely high price for the experience. However, an early space tourism market survey conducted in Japan showed that people were only willing to pay approximately $40,000 to $80,000 U.S. dollars for a two-day tour in orbit (Collins, Stockmans, & Maita, 1996). Another survey which took place in the U.S. in 1997 suggested that the average price that people were willing to pay for a two-week vacation in space was only $10,812 2 (O’Neil, Bekey, Mankins, Rogers, & Stallmer, 1998). Recent studies indicated ticket price per person ranged from $200,000 (Webber, 2010) to $250,000 (Chang & Chern, 2013) at least. Clearly, despite our fascination with space travel, affordable commercial space tourism is quite a way off. Optimistically, advanced technology has made public space tourism increasingly feasible. On March 30, 2017, SpaceX, an American space transport services company, made history in the aerospace industry: a used rocket Falcon 9 was successfully launched and
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