If you have enough money, the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to take you on a trip to space.
The prospect of space tourism is exciting but it’s also raising a lot of legal and moral questions about what happens when things go wrong.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’s Blue Origin are just two companies offering space flights to celebrities and civilians.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX also took a group of civilians to space last year.
Space may be becoming more accessible but the accessibility means people no longer need to go through the same rigorous training and medical checklist that astronauts have to.
Space agencies are also hoping to send astronauts on much longer space missions than we’ve ever seen before.
One of the main issues this raises is what happens if someone dies in space?
How many people have died in space?
Space is dangerous for many reasons but only around 30 astronauts and cosmonauts have died while attempting space missions.
Seven astronauts died when Nasa’s Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after its launch in 1986.
A further seven astronauts died when Nasa’s Columbia shuttle broke up when it returned to Earth in 2003.
These tragic events were shocking and killed all crew on board.
No spaceflight has been able to teach us what would happen if one crew member dies during a mission while everyone else is alive and fit enough to continue.
What would happen if you die in space?
International space law dictates that individual countries are responsible for allowing and supervising national space activities.
If someone were to die during a space tourism flight, it could land the specific company in a lot of legal trouble and an investigation into duty of care.
Legal concerns would be the least of the crew’s worries though as they’d need to work out what to do with the body.
If it’s a short spaceflight, it would be easy enough to store the body and bring it back to Earth.
According to space experts Christopher Newman and Nick Caplan, the body would need to be kept cool to prevent decomposition and stored somewhere that wouldn’t contaminate the other crew members.
More problems arise for longer missions.
The experts wrote in The Conversation that they think a dead body on a year-long trip to Mars would need to be frozen, perhaps towards the outside of the spacecraft, in order to bring it back to Earth safely.
This could also reduce the weight of dead bodies and save space in the craft.
The space researchers also suggest that as we colonize space, bodies may have to be disposed of rather than preserved.
Burials would contaminate planets but catapulting bodies into the abyss of space would lead to moral and space debris issues.
As we edge closer to a new age of space exploration, technology for storing or disposing of human bodies is something space agencies will have to look into.
This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced here with permission.