Looking for insurance for your next space flight? Help could be on the way. AXA S.A. (ticker: AXAHY), the French insurance heavyweight, is hoping to launch a new line of coverage: insurance for space travelers.
“The product that we’re working on developing would be to insure against bodily injury to the space flight participants, themselves,” Chris Kunstadter, global head of space underwriting at AXA XL, AXA S.A.’s commercial insurance division, told Barron’s. “That’s what we’re looking at for the future.”
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Insurance company AXA is looking to venture into space travel coverage.
HENNING KAISER/DDP/AFP via Getty Images
Looking for insurance for your next space flight? Help could be on the way. AXA S.A . (ticker: AXAHY), the French insurance heavyweight, is hoping to launch a new line of coverage: insurance for space travelers.
“The product that we’re working on developing would be to insure against bodily injury to the space flight participants, themselves,” Chris Kunstadter, global head of space underwriting at AXA XL, AXA S.A.’s commercial insurance division, told Barron’s. “That’s what we’re looking at for the future.”
The AXA discussions come as two billionaires, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, have made headlines for their respective space tourism companies. Bezos’ spaceflight services business, Blue Origin LLC, is set to send a rocket into space Tuesday morning—with Bezos himself and other passengers onboard. This comes just over a week after Branson’s Virgin Galactic Holdings (SPCE) successfully completed the world’s first space tourism flight, which counted Branson among those making the trip.
Insurance experts say there is insurance against space-related mishaps for rockets and the like—but not for passengers. The market size for space insurance has recently run at about $800 million annually, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Any new passenger insurance product is likely to be tricky for the insurers—and pricey for customers. Unlike travel insurance for the masses, the pool of people headed for space is relatively small, making the potential product riskier and more expensive.
Kunstadter said AXA has spoken with Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin for several years to understand the risks around space travel, though he declined to say whether those two companies are AXA customers. AXA has also spoken with companies specifically about the possibility of a human insurance policy offering. Blue Origin didn’t respond to Barron’s request for comment. Kunstadter didn’t disclose when the new business would be launched.
AXA’s consumer-facing insurance offering would be a new endeavor, as it currently offers insurance against companies’ space equipment, such as satellites. Kunstadter said one of its customers is Sirius XM Holdings (SIRI), which recently sent into space a satellite that failed in orbit. AXA declined to comment on whether it was an insurer for Sirus XM for that incident.
The space travel market has considerable growth potential, which bodes well for the potential market for insurance against it.
Space travel spending could reach between $10 billion and $15 billion annually by 2030, said Ken Herbert, Virgin Galactic analyst at Canaccord Genuity. Virgin Galactic could see $1.7 billion in space revenue by then. “Space tours, we estimate, can be a fairly substantial market,” he said.
Write to jacob.sonenshine@barrons.com