PayPal is preparing itself for the next big trend in online shopping: space commerce.
According to Fox News, the e-commerce company announced PayPal Galactic on Thursday and intends to make space commerce a reality. The main reason behind it is for astronauts to make payments on Earth while taking extended trips into space.
"Astronauts who live for months in space still need to pay their bills back on Earth and for entertainment while in space," Anuj Nayar, the senior director of communications and social media of PayPal, told Fox News. "As we travel through space and explore new planets, we will still need to pay for life on Earth and out there, but how we will do this is not exactly clear."
This service is not just for astronauts, a number of companies have recently opened the idea of space tourism and exploration for the general public. Privately owned companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have reportedly explored the possibility.
In 2011, Fox News reported a Russian company called Orbital Technologies was planning a space hotel that is planned to be opened in 2016. The hotel will cost about $1 million for a five-night stay and it promises all the comforts of a hotel on Earth.
"This is not total fantasy at this point," Nayar told the San Jose Mercury News. "In five to 10 years people are going to be out there and needing these services."
Space tourism also has plenty of heavy-hitting investors. Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla and Charles Simonyi and Paul Allen of Microsoft are all said to have invested heavily in space tourism.
"That culture of mega-wealth and corporate prestige gets it. The money isn't an issue," John Spencer, founder and president of the Space Tourism Society and a longtime space architect, said. "Some of these guys are very technical-savvy, very politically savvy, very wealthy, and they're doing it because they want to."
Spencer said he was designing a "superyacht," a space cruise ship, to be constructed in space and that would orbit the Earth. Virgin Galactic is set to launch its first commercial space flight on Christmas this year with guests said to include Brad Pitt and Justin Beiber.
