Insights into space tourism discourse on TikTok using a deep visual model and a text mining method: trends, topics, and public attitudes

Recently, the emergence of commercial space travel products has generated significant interest in space tourism from the public. The primary purpose of this study is to extensively explore the development trends, hot topics, and public attitudes of space tourism, offering broad implications for researchers and stakeholders both theoretically and practically. Thus, a total of 4727 short videos pertaining to space tourism on TikTok were collected. Accordingly, a deep visual framework with 188,450 manually annotated images was developed to analyze 140,472 keyframes, and the text information of short videos was also investigated from three perspectives (i.e., titles, narratives, and comments) to identify space tourism trends, topics, and attitudes. The results confirmed the following: (1) From a global perspective, commercial enterprises gradually dominate the space tourism industry; (2) Focusing on the Chinese market, the space tourism products accessible to the general public are terrestrial forms, which have been successfully launched in many cities across China and mainly attract parent-child travelers and leisure travelers; (3) Chinese market perceptions revolve around “high risk, high cost” in the negative aspect, while positive perceptions involve “excitement, motivation, and support”. The findings provide backing for a further development of the commercial space tourism industry, while also offering helpful guidance for businesses, policymakers, and future research.