Why this professor is using $50,000 of his retirement savings to realize his childhood dream and fly into space

• Chris Cokinos has wanted to travel to space ever since he was a kid, he told Insider.
• He finally will realize his dream in 2024 via World View, which offers more affordable space flights.

Growing up, Chris Cokinos recalls huddling close to the television set and using an old-fashioned clunky tape recorder to record the news, which included everything from the Apollo missions to updates from Skylab, NASA's first space station.

Later at night, he would play the recordings back to himself and imagine traveling to space.

Decades later, the University of Arizona creative writing professor no longer has to imagine it: he'll be taking a flight into the Earth's stratosphere with one of the more affordable space tourism operators, World View.

"It's a cliche for people to say it's a childhood dream, but it is a childhood dream," Cokinos told Insider.

World View, a Tucson, Arizona-based startup is offering commercial space flights due to take off as early as 2024 for $50,000 per flight. This is a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that other space tourism operators charge. Virgin's suborbital space flight, for example, will set passengers back $450,000. While Blue Origin and SpaceX flights range from $28 million to an estimated $50 million per passenger, MIT Technology Review reported.

World View said it recently signed up its 1,000th customer and therefore now holds the longest waiting list of customers of all space tourism companies. It also said it requires the smallest deposit to reserve a spot — $500.

It's all in a bid to make space tourism, largely the domain of billionaires, as accessible as possible, says World View's CEO, Ryan Hartman.

"We're trying to deliver this to as many people as possible [which] means we have to make this as affordable as possible," Hartman told Insider.

The $50,000 price tag for the World View mission, however, is still unaffordable for many. For Cokinos, World View's flight cost will easily be absorbed from his decades' worth of retirement savings. But the startup also has young customers in mind, who aren't anywhere near retirement age, and is offering financing packages to attract them.

"I'm thinking about [...] the Gen Z or the millennial who values experiences more than they value things," said Hartman. "They'll figure out their own way to make $50,000 work."

According to Hartman, the fully-autonomous hexagonal-shaped space capsule powered by helium and lithium will ascend up to 100,000 feet, nearly double that of commercial airplanes and high enough to see the full curvature of the Earth.

As well as being a professor, Cokinos is also a poet and writer of nonfiction on nature and the environment. His next book project is focused on the moon, so getting a chance to see it up close is an exciting prospect for him.

World View's capsule is designed to optimize views and includes personal viewing screens for each passenger. This is another aspect of the flight that aligns with Cokinos' long-held passion for outer space.

"I was on an expedition in Antarctica," he said. "It's the only other thing that I could compare this to and it was a little bit like being on another planet."

The World View flights will launch from sites based at the seven wonders of the world in the coming years, with the first taking off from the Grand Canyon.

Cokinos, who has lived in both Arizona and Utah, is particularly excited about gaining a new perspective of the Grand Canyon, a place he knows intimately well.

It feels necessary, he said, "to see the curvature of the Earth and see weather patterns and begin to think about its precarity."