Assessing Space Tourism Propensity: A New Questionnaire for Future Space Tourists

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The title of the article should be changed to “potential space tourists” or “future space tourists”.

The purpose of the article in the abstract (1-Background) should be rewritten. The profile of the space travelers does not emerge from this research.

Line 37: The authors argue that “Although currently expensive, the (ST) market is expected to expand soon”. Where does this come from?

The lines 50-100 are proposed to be moved from the introduction to the methodology section.

The article is missing a literature review. Hypotheses should be derived from the literature review.

Line 140: What is the subject of study of these students? It is relevant to the subject of the research, e.g. tourism studies etc.? Are they all studying the same subject or do they have different backgrounds?

In the short description of space tourism in the questionnaire, some phrases may have influenced the responses of the participants. For example, the phrase “Although the space industry is making great strides, people’s perception of spacecraft reliability is low…” may negatively bias participants' views of the risk of such a trip and therefore their willingness to participate in such a trip in the future.

It would also be useful if the description of space tourism in the questionnaire included the current cost of such a trip so that the participating students would have a more complete picture.

The questionnaire (Table 1) should be moved from the text to an Appendix.

The major limitation of the study as the authors themselves acknowledge is its sample. For example, they ask people with no personal income how much they would be willing to pay for a trip to space.

The conclusions are a repetition of what is stated above, they do not offer anything new. It is proposed to remove this section and rename section 7 to “Discussion and Conclusions”.

Many of the sources are quite old. In such a contemporary subject it is important to use as recent sources as possible.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

I want to express my gratitude for your valuable observations and suggestions. We have made the requested changes and believe they have significantly improved the quality of our article. Below is a summary of the actions taken in response to your comments:

• The title of the article has been changed to "Assessing Space Tourism Propensity: a new questionnaire for future space tourists".
• The 'Background' section of the abstract has been rewritten to align with the research content.
• The source on expected growth of space tourism has been inserted as requested (line 46). 
• Lines 50-100 have been moved from the introduction to the subsequent section (lines 61-76).
• Hypothesis b) has been reformulated in a softer manner, clarifying the exploratory nature due to the lack of literature reference (lines 120-121).
• Additional details about the students involved in the study have been provided as requested (lines 154 and 165-166).
• We have removed the potentially influencing phrase in the questionnaire and specified this potential bias in the limitations (lines 588-599).
• The description of the current cost of space travel has been included in the questionnaire for a more comprehensive understanding by participants (lines 193-198).
• The questionnaire has been moved to the Supplementary file as suggested.
• We acknowledge the main limitation of the study as the sample and have specified in the limitations section that in the future, we aim to administer the questionnaire to a broader and more heterogeneous sample, considering factors such as age and income, to evaluate how age and income affect space tourism propensity.
• The conclusions section has been renamed "Discussion and Conclusions," eliminating redundancies.
• We have added some more recent sources as suggested.

We greatly appreciate your dedication to improving our work, and we hope the implemented changes meet your expectations. We remain available for further corrections or clarifications.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to read this scientific work. It looks like a mature scientific work, but it has several elements that need to be explained, otherwise it is difficult to evaluate the article.

One of such issues is the selection of the research sample. It is not known how the students were selected. Was it random? The parameters of this test are also not provided - sampling error. In my opinion, for 333 respondents (randomly selected), the sampling error for p=0.95 exceeds 5%, because to be lower than 5%, 386 observations (randomly selected) are needed. Therefore, on what basis do the authors generalize their conclusions?

Since the research results were based on a sample of students, i.e. young people, it seems reasonable to also limit the topic of the article to students.

Another limitation arises here - it is not only that they were young people, but that they were students. The difference is that students are only part of the group of young and best educated people.

Although I appreciate that the authors used so many research scales to construct their own scale, I do not understand how these scales were normalized or in what other way their content was borrowed - in most cases they are symmetrical, in others asymmetrical. Such diversity leads to many difficulties in standardizing the scales used.

What exactly is the main purpose of this article? Is it about examining the issue of space tourism or providing a proven research questionnaire?

Among the limitations, I did not find any reference to the definition of space tourism. Is a trip into space really tourism or just a journey? According to the definitions of tourism, it is difficult to call participants of such a flight tourists since they do not spend the night in orbit. At the same time, it is difficult to call them "one-day visitors" since they do not experience the transformation of day into night and night into day during their stay in space. I would like to point out that in this unique journey, science loses its point of reference to the laws of nature applicable on Earth, which at the same time raises many definitional problems.

Overall, I evaluate the article positively, but it is worth supplementing it with the additional information indicated above. I wish the authors good luck!

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

We sincerely thank you for taking the time to review our scientific work and for your thoughtful comments. We appreciate your positive evaluation and valuable insights. We have carefully considered your suggestions, and below are our responses and the actions we have taken:

• Regarding the research sample section, all participants were psychology students, both undergraduate and graduate, who voluntarily chose to be part of the study (lines 154-166).
• Concerning the calculation of the effect size, it was computed post hoc using GPower through a sensitivity analysis. This type of analysis requires entering the sample size (n=333) and specifying the power (1-Beta err prob), which in our case was 0.8, and the alpha, which was 0.05. The sensitivity analysis results allowed deducing the effect size retrospectively (lines 343-352).
• In line with your suggestion, we propose limiting the conclusions drawn from our study to a sample of young individuals (line 583), specifying that we will propose further studies on heterogeneous samples to draw more general conclusions about the population (lines 585-588).
• We found your critique on the need to normalize scales and standardize scores particularly useful. Indeed, we had not considered this aspect. Therefore, we proceeded in two different ways. First, we multiplied each of the 11 items of the STP-Q scale by its factor loading and then repeated the PCA. Second, we standardized the scores of the 11 items into z-scores and repeated the PCA. Both approaches yielded results confirming the original validity of the instrument, with no changes in values.
• We also appreciate your highlighting the need to better clarify the objectives of the work. As indicated in lines 64-70, we pursued both objectives. We first validated our questionnaire (STP-Q, see Table 1 in the supplementary materials) to measure the propensity for space tourism, and then we analyzed which factors predict the propensity for space tourism (regression analysis, see Table 3).
• We have included references to define Space Tourism (lines 29 and 36) and incorporated your reflection on the uniqueness of space tourism as a journey per se (lines 37-44).

Thank you for the overall positive evaluation of the article and your constructive feedback, which we have tried to incorporate in the best possible way. Your observations have undoubtedly contributed to the improvement of our work.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The reviewer’s comments have been addressed. The text has been improved in quality.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required